Latency issues with skills

[Eclipt]

It is common knowledge that this game is heavily ping dependent—so much so that even 100 ping is considered bad by some players. 200 ping: You cannot do rotations properly. 300 ping: People tell you to uninstall.

 

It is quite frustrating seeing people cast shit many more times, especially in arena.

 

I, myself, can cast 5 Dragontongues in 3 seconds as Blade Master. But I see some fortunate people use 8 Dragontongues in the same 3 second time-frame. This is damn frustrating. Technically speaking, with a proper skill queue, it is possible for people to cast 3 skills per second even with 300ms. 

 

There are quite a few ways to handle a queue or make it seem like a queue. 

 

One example would be to actually have a queue where the player sends requests to cast skills and the server gives a “green light” when Global Cooldown (GCD) is over.

 

The second possible example is a bit lighter on server side. The client sends post-like requests to the server with its internal cooldown without waiting for response from the server. When the server confirms that the interval is valid, it registers the skill and gives the result to client. The downside, however, is that some players may face problems with unstable connections such as wi-fi.

 

A third example would be fixing the current skill queue. For whatever reason, I can cast Flicker as fast as other BMs who have lower ping than me. The problem ONLY occurs with Dragontongue.

 

A round-about solution would be to physically spread the servers out. Example: Server group 1 to the east-coast, server group 2 to west-coast. But this wouldn't solve the problem for cross-server or arena.

 

Region wide account transfer could be a fix for people that started in one server (because of friends, clannies, etc…), but upon playing, noticed the delay to be too much to handle. This would only require an ID where previous log files reside, and a match-maker for databases. Basically, a translator between two or more servers. Alternatively, log files could be deleted and simply replaced by "Acquired On Another Server" notation. This can work currently with NA-EU, and perhaps when content release matches up with other regions, those regions could be included too.

 

The last example I have for you would be recreating the game on new engine. This would fix many more issues such as FPS drops in crowded areas, but will most likely not happen due to high expenses.

 

This would be helpful not only for NA and EU, but possibly for Chinese and Russian servers, which cover a lot of ground resulting in big differences between the ping of players. Because this game is interested in being a part of e-Sports, it is IMPERATIVE to have this skill delay issue fixed, especially if you expect to maintain an audience of people who don’t live “next door” to the server.

 

I'd like for people to post their suggestions and additional examples of how people can cast stuff with different, higher pings. Maybe developers will pay attention to this if they are interested in e-Sports and having a bigger player base in general.