I figured as much (and I don't mean that as an insult, unlike the usual "oh, CS, that explains it comments). I think I posted somewhere else that I suspected you'd spent a lot of time on Source engine games. The fact is that you're used to it. You had antilag when you first started playing these sorts of games and you've never had to really deal with games where it doesn't exist. You're quite correct as well when you say that millions of players would be pissed off if Valve removed it from their engine. I made the same point myself on the Ins boards. The thing is though, they're all in the same boat - i.e. they don't know any other way. They also have no understanding of networking and think that lag is a bug. The description on that GoW movie you linked speaks volumes about what people believe when it comes to networked gaming.mbrooksay said:
Don't get me wrong here, I don't love leading targets for the sake of leading targets (although I maintain that it requires more skill and attention than when you don't) and allowing you to shoot directly at a person at close range is a good thing. But that one positive isn't enough to offset the negative effects. Nothing fires me up more than being killed in cover or by a corpse whose bullets are counted post-mortem (ArmA's a bastard for that). While it's true that you're not in the open for any longer (I never claimed otherwise), you ARE visible to a lagging player earlier. They see you before you see them, that's all part of the client prediction, something which I'm ok with. Without lag compensation, it balances out. The lagger sees you first, but your shot's registered before his, so it's even. With lag compensation however, it skews the balance in favour of the lagger and that's just wrong. They see you first and they fire first. Your shot will be registered first, true, but because their shots are already on the way to the server, they're treated as live and you get hit. A non lagger wouldn't be able to do this.
The other problem is the one I mentioned in my previous post. It comes down to the same issue of client prediction as in the last paragraph. The lagger can see things well ahead of where his body is, giving him an advantage over a non lagger. His vision (and therefore his gun) can be in the open while his body languishes behind cover. This allows him (unintentionally mind you) to find a target and fire without his body being visible to the target. If the target moves behind cover before the lagger's body emerges, then the target will NEVER see his attacker. He'll die though, the lag compensation takes care of that. It's completely unfair on the player who's not lagging and as with the last example, that's just wrong. A person should not be handicapped because they happen to have joined a local server.
There's a third problem which I also brought up on the Ins boards. Antilag and ballistics don't work together. If by some miracle the Source engine was modified to handle bullet objects without killing servers and the Ins devs implemented full bullet physics as people are begging for, I guarantee you there'd be people exploiting it within hours. By tweaking your cl_interp value, you can nullify travel time and completely remove the need to lead your targets. The only way to stop that is to implement full client-side hit detection, but apart from maximising the effects of the problems described above, that's also easy to hack and therefore no good for anything but coop games (where it's frankly brilliant and cheats are a non-issue - it should be mandatory in coop games)
I don't mind the intention behind anti-lag, but it just doesn't level the playing field. It instead skews things towards the players who, by definition, should be disadvantaged and then what's the point? We might as well all be on dialup, since you get an advantage that way. Sounds like a stupid thing to say, but there's a bloke in ArmA who pings 200ms constantly. He thrashes everyone else because he sees them before they see him and he kills people after he's been killed himself. The antilag gives him an advantage and that's just not fair.
I doubt we'll agree on this issue anytime soon and you're certainly welcome to your point of view, but I think that the fact that the majority of your gaming experience has been "adjusted" by these sorts of systems is giving you a slightly unbalanced view of the situation.
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