Broken and Inconsistent Hitmarkers - Why an Enemy Doesn't Die When You Want

  • No he didn't eat three bananas super fast, no she didn't turn on god mode hacks.

    Hitmarkers are undeniably broken in this game and from my experience it stems from three areas but without further testing I can't narrow down exactly all of the cases...

    Fat Pirates and Normalized Hitboxes: Right now it's an advantage to be a fat pirate, not a huge one but one nonetheless. The devs have stated before they've normalized hitboxes thus what that means is the hitbox is inside the burgeoning mass of a fat pirate so when you hit their arm or the bottom of their belly or somewhere the hitbox doesn't overlap you get a hitmarker but you've done no damage. For some reason though the game shows hitmarkers when you've hit any mass including dead sharks instead of only showing when you do damage. I don't know if that's normal for games with normalized hitboxes I don't really have experience here, all I know is that in this game fat pirates that know how to play are notoriously hard to kill. The opposite is probably true of skinny pirates with their hitbox extending past their visible model which seems like a disadvantage.

    World Geometry Blocking Your Shot: The worst offenders here are the towers at skullforts. From certain angles and towers players (and skeletons) are literally invincible inside of them while still being able to kill you. Another offender is shooting at certain angles at players on boats from another boat. The longer the range you fire from, you more often than not will get a hitmarker without actually hitting probably due to you actually hitting geometry but visually you're hitting the player both with the hitmarker and the feedback you get visually of the impact on an enemy player.

    Latency/Tick rate: The most common one seems to be related to all the players ping and probably the overall tick rate of the servers. Not sure what the tick rate is for certain but they do seem rather low. You will often hit and get a hitmarker without damaging. This goes for all weapons but easiest to see with the EoR or pistol. The blunder is harder to prove because of its pellets. Often you can actually kill a player with the EoR without getting a hitmarker, you can often actually damage a player without even knowing it especially from range.

    I've also observed a forth really specific one not sure if it's related to the above but if someone is swinging a sword in your face in a narrow area (think the bottom of the sloop) the second you shoot them it seems to block some of the pellets/shots from the blunderbuss at point blank range.

    I'd like to hear other player's experiences and feedback about how to narrow this down? I believe it's a significant issue impacting all players but most aren't aware of it without extensive pvp experience.

  • 13
    Posts
    25.1k
    Views
  • My pirate is as about as fat as they come, trust me, absolutely no advantage there.

  • @blackbeard-lufy said in Broken and Inconsistent Hitmarkers - Why an Enemy Doesn't Die When You Want:

    My pirate is as about as fat as they come, trust me, absolutely no advantage there.

    You wouldn't be able to tell. On your screen you're not getting hit.

  • Informative. The sword block is intentional I believe.

  • @eatdamuffin Well I don't typically let anyone get into sword range, and when they shoot and I take damage I think that's a pretty good indicator that I was hit.

  • @blackbeard-lufy said in Broken and Inconsistent Hitmarkers - Why an Enemy Doesn't Die When You Want:

    @eatdamuffin Well I don't typically let anyone get into sword range, and when they shoot and I take damage I think that's a pretty good indicator that I was hit.

    The point is when you're shot at and on the enemy screen they get a hitmarker and you don't take any damage. Both players would only know that if they sat and discussed it or if one player is experienced in PVP.

    To them they hit you, to you you didn't get hit at all cause your health didn't decrease. I didn't say every shot against you is like that but there are some. It also depends how good you are, fat pirates die just as easily if they're inexperienced. But match an experienced player with that hitbox and they're pretty hard to kill but the same goes for any good player cause of the other hitmarker bugs.

    Often I hear people saying they've hit me and gotten hitmarkers when my health is still at 100%. "He's almost dead I've hit him twice" etc.

    @gloog said in Broken and Inconsistent Hitmarkers - Why an Enemy Doesn't Die When You Want:

    Informative. The sword block is intentional I believe.

    I thought it might be but the same isn't as true in wider areas. A sword swing shouldn't block any shots though unless what's happening is similar to the geometry bug and some of the pellets or shots are hitting the physical sword.

  • I've heard similar things over voice chat, and I've also heard someone say that they killed me when they didn't even hit me. In that situation I just assumed they were bad. I don't think the game would show that I died on their end, but not mine. Am I wrong, has anyone had that happen before?

  • Last night I had 4 skellies with blunderbusses. They all just popped out of the jungle on me...
    Long story short i start hacking away hitting my trigger faster than the animation and they all 4 shoot at like 3 foot range and i take no damage what so ever.... No sound of block no sound of hit or anything...
    I could literally see the pellets hit me in the face lol
    Should have definitely been taking a ride.

  • @viktormoroska said in Broken and Inconsistent Hitmarkers - Why an Enemy Doesn't Die When You Want:

    I've heard similar things over voice chat, and I've also heard someone say that they killed me when they didn't even hit me. In that situation I just assumed they were bad. I don't think the game would show that I died on their end, but not mine. Am I wrong, has anyone had that happen before?

    Not death but they may think they've hit you a bunch when they haven't due to the hitmarkers.

  • Its good that you've put thought into this but most of those points can be summed up in one line.

    The Hitmarkers are all Client Side.

    What this means is that whenever you get a hitmarker, its because your client decided you hit them. Because of network latency this means you might not have even been close to hitting them on the server end, or the server has your position recorded as slightly different when you fired the shot (so you hit geometry instead of the target, for example). Since all damage is tracked and recorded on the server side, what you see happen on your screen is not authoritative.

    The inconsistent hitmarkers are a big problem in a game that has PvP. It leads to a lot of false hacking accusations because the feedback you get doesn't match at all with what actually happened according to the server.

    I mentioned this problem awhile ago in the Pioneer forums before the game even released. The hitmarkers should be changed to relay that the server has recorded damage, not what you think happened.

    The hitmarkers aren't broken or inconsistent, they are just relying on the wrong data.

  • @d3adst1ck

    Ah good to know didn't know they were client side. That's pretty bad.

  • They did it this way since you will hardly ever notice it in ship combat because the targets are so large and not very mobile so adding the extra validation is not really needed. Its likely that there are cannon shots that show a hitmarker and play the crescendo that don't actually hit the enemy ship but the criteria to get this to happen would be extremely difficult to reproduce.

    Client side becomes a problem when you are shooting at smaller more agile targets, like other players or skeletons, because network latency has a bigger influence on position and shot calculation.

  • @eatdamuffin
    The latency/lag/hit registration is so bad that I've seen it with the blunderbuss too. There have been times when I've shot someone point blank 3 times with the blunderbuss, gotten hit markers, but they don't die. When that happens, I know the lag/latency is bad and shoot the air to the left or right of them. I don't get any hit marker but they die.

13
Posts
25.1k
Views
1 out of 13