Tickrate Stuff [ Edited ]

[apostolateofDOOM]

@DoYaSeeMe The gas and particle changes ruin the game to accommodate inferior hardware when the game barely ran properly on last gen consoles so Respawn with all their ''experience'' but more importantly thirst for more profit decided to chop it for Switch and throw them into the same matches with console and PC too.  Another one size fits all approach as with everything else. It's also this thirst for profit that they don't increase the server costs and give us improvements. Chopping the game to keep their server expenditure the same to make those improvements would be a choice, not a necessity as many clients could take the increased rate just as the servers can provide them with an increased cost. 

Most users have better hardware and internet connections compared to 5 years ago.

Money is what it ultimately boils down to and evaluating cost vs benefits, is it sought after enough to warrant the changes, can we make more cost effective changes elsewhere and whatever other business considerations.

FPS games should be played at 60 fps standard over a decade ago with vast improvements in both user and server hardware since then. Why should they dumb the game down so a few can play a FPS at 30fps? Likely some of the sound and other issues are also related to lower spec platforms as a lot of the changes appear to be CPU, GPU or RAM cuts rather than server resources. You say that most won't be able to make the most of these changes but on PC playing FPS @ 60 is the bare minimum, not optimal so i imagine a lot of them would benefit and the same with next gen consoles.

Who knows. It wouldn't be the first time and a bit of a pattern now of they said they would or wouldn't do something that ends up not being the case with ''provide a quality experience'' or ''not milking our players'' or  ''we fixed audio'' or ''we fixed rank'' just to name a few off the top of my head.

[PODERINGPUGALIST]

Whatever man, defend all you want, but all I know is that it is about an every game occurrence for me that at some point I will take almost a full shields worth of damage after I have already closed a door, cleared a corner or even dropped off a ledge. To me that is basically unacceptable, but I guess not because I keep playing, a lot of the time miserably lol. 

[DoYaSeeMe]

@PODERINGPUGALISTAnd you will keep getting this even at 128Hz snapshot rate. Want to get rid of it? Move the whole lobby close to the data center, then LAN everyone to the match servers. Though even then you will only be 99.999% safe from this issue.

Seen the peeker's advantage issue in Valorant, with all its praised internet backbone and fast servers. Also seen players there with 200ms lag, so I guess you can try this game too if you want to feel another kind of misery :P.

[hayhor]

@PODERINGPUGALIST Every game you get shot behind cover a full shields worth and you keep playing? Why?

[apostolateofDOOM]

@hayhor I think this is bound to happen to some extent anyway with how matchmaking is handled. It's also likely more noticeable for those in higher tiers as split second decisions can leave little margin for error and in those cases where you're trying to make a play you'll notice when things don't go how they should because of that delay before it happens on your screen.

I wouldn't have a problem if we're talking milliseconds but LL finished her quip when popping a drone and half way through a bat before the shot came through which is ridiculous.

[hayhor]

@apostolateofDOOM Every match?

Also the higher level players are the biggest moaners and will blame the game when they do something dumb. For example when wraith got her hitbox nerf there was a great video of tsm reps crying about it when he died in 2 situations where he put himself as the sole focus of all 3 players of enemy teams. It wasnt the nerf but all his watchers and followers probably believed him.

[apostolateofDOOM]

@hayhor You wouldn't notice it every match but it happens several times in a few hr session and enough for it to be frustrating as hell when trying to climb ranked which is why i don't bother with it anymore even though i would like to.

I don't deny there's times when the blame is put on the game or anything and everything else in heat of the moment but other times it is just the game and people defend it like there's no issue or it couldn't possibly be improved upon.

[DoYaSeeMe]

How to get shot behind cover:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bufferbloat

Now let's increase the tick rate, fill up the buffers even faster, shall we?

[Cro_Pittt]

@DoYaSeeMe So to sum it up you're basically saying that nothing can be done about the major issues of this game? 

[RayleenKovacs]

@DoYaSeeMe , as a fellow engineer, I'd like to quote a couple things that may not be (necessarily) true, an also a couple that may worth some clarification or warning:

"Wait, but everyone says that the potato servers are at 20Hz, why are you lying?!?" 20Hz, or 20 times per second is the minimum limit for the server to send an entire game update to the clients. The thing is, game updates are big for Apex, so they need to be split into multiple packets and sent throughout multiple ticks.

Warning: splitting into multiple packets has a downside: loosing a packet means loosing everything sometimes. Games are most of the times coded to discard the entire sequence, sometimes just the packet depending on how good their "netcode" is. This is specially crucial for games with long ttk/ttd like Apex, because you need more shots to kill a guy (or die). The you extend the fight, the worse it gets. Respawn realized this in the past, lowering ttk by introducing evo shields. In the first time, this was an attempt to easily solve the infamous "NO DAMAGE REGISTERED" issue, and it worked. Sadly, several complains appeared from lower ranked players that got easily killed, and since they are a majority, Respawn took this back, and we are where we are now: Long fights, packets lost (mostly on server side), damage not registering properly, and people mad about it.

"Raise it to 120 - 28Hz, what are you waiting for?!?" Doubling the data rate simply requires twice the bandwidth and probably twice as many servers. This doesn't just double the bill, it also makes the game more unstable, with more packets dropped or lost. All this while the majority of players don't actually have devices that support more than 60Hz (some may even be at 30Hz).

Not entirely true: PS and XBOX run at 60hz, which is the baseline for the whole civilized world. Nowadays we have more and more PCs running at 120hz or more, actually any pro-player is running insane hardware at 240hz. You have 2 options here: Having 2 times the hardware or having 2 times optimized netcode. I believe you can compromise in the middle, increase your hardware by 50%, and improve your netcode another 50%. In fact, I strongly believe that may be a ton of things that can be done to improve netcode performance before putting hands on the hardware. Besides, it is a complete lie to say this would make the game more unstable, you know it: Not even bandwidth is a problem nowadays, when the ugliest connection is above 50Mb even in the farthest places of earth. Apex roughly consumes 6-8Mb, I've been monitoring this in my own connection.

"Ok then, reduce the data, make an update fit into a single packet.or at least twice as few as it is now" I am pretty sure that devs continuously work on optimizing this, but we are asking for a 2x-5x reduction, while the game keeps adding stuff. The data that's being sent is also pretty basic: coordinates, action id's, animation states,flags. Nothing that can be cut without getting serious issues like players teleporting or stuff vanishing. Using a very powerful compression can probably make that data smaller, but all that gain gets lost an then some, as both the server and the clients need time & power to compress and then decompress.

Not true: The game is not adding new functionality that needs to travel differently around the network, neither is adding weird objects nor anything (although it did added those useless prowlers in the Bloodhound event which managed to live until today). At this point, again, i believe there must be lot of optimizing that can be done, i can make a separate post about it.

About the data that's currently being sent: I'm pretty sure it must be very basic by now, but one of the KEY measures has not to do with what you actually send, but WHEN you send it and WHY you do it. For example: I don't need my teammate footsteps when aiming down sights on a triple take, which means i don't need their data (but for positioning on the mini map), neither the obituary, nor anything that's away and I'm not looking at, etc. They have to get rid of everything that's not required in the exact moment each client requires it. By doing this, they may reduce network traffic a lot. 

About teleporting players: We do have this issue nowadays. Every game I see at least 1 or 2 guys teleporting around. Sometimes they are impossible to hit. So, something is not right today, and I'm not sure it is because of reducing packets... it may be the opposite...

"Damn, you're so negative! They should increase the packet size then, bam!" I believe the size limitations are set to meet the network standards. There are many tons of old and low quality hardware across the millions of miles of wire, they are to blame. Upgrading all these is probably a matter of trillions of $.

I think you are right here: Increasing packet size could be an actual disaster. Can you imagine if the current servers lose a packet that's twice the current size? They cannot handle all the current ones so I wouldn't even think about making them bigger. Besides, is not in the power of EA/Respawn to modify the world's internet infrastructure.

If you got this far, i want to thank you, because i know this was long and takes time.

And please, do not take my comments personal, in the end this is just a game business, and EA/Respawn are on the "end of lifecycle" for this product. That's why I don't think they even care about us discussing this, or even fixing the issue.

Best.