Summary
After playing ET for a year, I know for sure that some players do better and some do worse than if they all had the same computer on the same network with the same pings/latency/response times, etc. I’ve seen some extreme cases where players do impossibly good, even against really good players on servers with PunkBuster. I would like to know if they are getting game “turn” frames from the server before other players, or if their responses (e.g. mouse click) are somehow given precedence over other players’ responses.
Details
In ET, I’d like to know how a player can start with no XP, yet wipeout everyone (over 30 players), even generals, easily. Yes, I do know that some players are really really good. However, mathematics can be used here to prove something is fishy. There should be a bell curve with fewer and fewer players showing up as we look for better and better players. When you play for a year, and see a large gap between the best players and a handful of “super” players that are much better than the other “best” players, something is fishy.
I spec’d one of the most extreme cases of a “super” player and made a demo. The player was pretty good using many ET tactics correctly, but too good … almost “invisible”, appears to get a remarkable number of headshots using very few bullets, and never loses a 1 on 1 firefight. Actually, only getting killed by arty or direct rifle grenade a couple of times.
Within 2 maps, more than 2/3rds (~20) of the players quit on the EQ (earthquake/earthlink) server. The demo recording doesn’t really give a feel for just how much “better” the player was than everyone else. No one was able to win in a firefight, even though this player was only a 1 star medic with no engy experience (but very quickly had 4 stars in Battle Sense and Light Weapons).
I’ve seen this before, where a player joins an XP save server and just wipes out everyone. I know something is fishy, since there is such a large gap between how good the best players are and the rare player that can wipeout the best players over and over in firefights. I see some clans’ ban lists and the reasons for banning. I know PunkBuster doesn’t catch everything, but I can’t help wondering if this isn’t more an issue of some people simply getting the “edge” because they are seeing things slightly in advance of nearly everyone else, giving them the edge in reaction time (for example allowing them to recover from being surprised and hit first by another player).
In over a year of playing ET, I’ve found these “super” players always have very low pings (I think always less than ~30ms). A few months ago, I read many posts about the sv_fps and snaps settings. I’m wondering if these “super” players are getting more fps from the server than the rest of us, or perhaps simply getting the same number of frames, but slightly in advance of other players. I’m not referring to fps drawn by the video card. I mean game “turn” frames calculated by the server. The server collects information from all the players as best as it can, then it computes where everyone is on the map, what they’re doing, who hit whom, etc. Then a frame is pushed out to all the players, keeping everything synchronized, informing each player of the outcome (e.g. bullet hit your body, not your head, and pushed you a little to the left).
Are they sitting on the LAN of the ET server? Do they have some weird tweaks in their cfg that makes them so much better than the rest of the players?
So when I see these very rare “super” players, they sometimes seem to skip (as if I’m lagging badly), but that might partly be due to my network connection, my ping times, etc. I’ve set my video fps at 44, as I’m using an old Athlon XP 1600 with an Nvidia T200. I’ve seen players with good pings and slower systems do quite good, consistently averaging more than 5 to 1 kills to deaths. My network connection isn’t the greatest. My personal experience in close up firefights with all of the good players is that I can start shooting first, catch them by suprise, but I often die after they shoot only 2-5 shots, even though I get half to a full clip into them first, doing my very best to aim for the head. When I’m farther away, I sometimes get runs of 5-10 kills in a row, and I rarely get best fragger of a map, but never when I’m doing close-up firefights. When I encounter one of these “super” players, sometimes they are nearly invisible to me, skipping across the screen instead of moving a little more smoothly like other players.
More recently, I’ve been leading my aim more (guessing that everything I see is delayed from whereever the server thinks things are), aiming as if what I’m seeing is in the past and too old to aim directly at any moving targets. This has helped noticeably and seems to corroborate my guess about everything I see is behind what many other players see. Players with longer ping times seem to be easier to beat in close 1 on 1 firefights, but the action is usually pretty jerky for me.
This is driving me nuts. How are these “super” players doing this? I’ve spent hours reading and tinkering with my cfg, including cl_timenudge (not really supposed to make a difference if anti-lag is on). A few months ago, I thought I had it. For a few maps starting with 0 XP, I wiped out everyone I pointed my gun at. It worked for a few maps and then quit. I was never able to duplicate that experience, but I got frustrated with the directories of mostly duplicated cfg files. Trying to figure out which ones were active for which server and which ones overloaded the settings in others was too frustrating. Anyway, I’m not so much interested in learning how to use tricks to beat everyone, as I am interested in learning how to detect other players using tricks that allow them to beat everyone in firefights.
This is mostly down to lots of practice and getting a real good aim together with a real good knowledge of the maps and what u can do on them, where u can do and and when. Call it experience.