TLDR; Hitmarkers should be server-side for a number of reasons so long as hit registration remains an issue.
Hit registration in this game has been absolutely godawful for months and shows no signs of improving (even when they supposedly improve it). I've just come to accept that a game with fast moving ships, buoyancy, and projectile physics running on ~34 tick rate cloud-based servers will probably never have good hit reg (though it would be nice if they used some of the money dumped into the emporium to make the move to better servers). That being said, the way hitmarkers currently work only exacerbates the issue. There are times where I shoot someone with EoR and/or flintlock 3-6 times in a row, with hitmarkers for every shot and no food eaten by the enemy, and they still don't die. At times hitmarkers/the flinch animation accompanying a shot seem to be totally meaningless, all because they are entirely client-side.
Here's what I propose; make hitmarkers server-side. That is to say, don't give the client a hitmarker until there has been communication between the server and the client confirming that damage has actually been dealt. This wouldn't differ significantly from the damage log system in place in many other games. It would perhaps lead to a slight delay in receiving a hitmarker after dealing damage (particularly when playing on higher ping), but that is not a considerable enough downside to outweigh the benefits. I would rather have a delayed, guaranteed indication of damage than the constant, meaningless false positives we currently deal with.
I can only think of 3 reasons hitmarkers have remained client side all of this time in spite of atrocious hit reg:
- The devs don't see bad hit reg/false hitmarkers as an issue.
If that's the case then they're naive. The devs can't be bothered to make the change. Frankly that would be laziness.- Perhaps the most likely; the devs don't want the game's notoriously bad hit reg to be even more obvious than it already is. Currently you generally only get a hitmarker if your shot hits the enemy on your end, regardless of whether it actually does damage to them, which for the sake of appearances seems to make sense. With server side hitmarkers you could miss the enemy on your screen and still deal damage/receive a hitmarker so long as the server accepted the miss as a hit (known as a backtrack, which is very common but currently doesn't give hitmarkers). This would make the hit reg issue more apparent but less frustrating.
To me it is more important that the player knows whether or not they've actually damaged their opponent than for hitmarkers to always correspond to hits on the client's screen. Ideally hit reg wouldn't be an issue in the first place and client side hitmarkers would be reflective of actual damage, but clearly that isn't and likely never will be the case. In the very least this change would make it apparent when you're getting "hit regged" or "Rared" while in combat, allowing you to adjust your shots and plays accordingly rather than trying to decipher a string of potentially meaningless hitmarkers. Client-side hitmarkers are generally fine in games with working hit registration—SoT is certainly not one of those games.
