Rubber Banding

Yannoa - Dreamweaver

To anyone that don't know, this is the bug/glitch where your character teleports a few meters back during a fall or when running really fast, usually activated by touching the ground. It can make your character hover in wherever place you snapped back to.

As I understand it, rubber banding was introduced as a side effect to a patch that prevented an exploit in a certain dungeon. Rubber banding seems to be a unique form of 'lag', and has been common in PWI for years, but has went unfixed. We seem to have mostly just learned to live with it, adapting our play styles around it. But I think it's time for us to revisit this issue.

Whaddya say, GMs? Should we poke the devs about this?

genotypist

Hi Yannoa,

I can tell you that the rubber banding issues with PWI is a mixture of various reasons. The engine itself is a cause, because player location is determined server-side, not client side. When your client and the server disagree on where you should be, the client yields to the server's coordinates and you're moved to where the server expects you to be, leading to the infamous rubber banding issue.

This is a fundamental design philosophy with PWI (and many other MMOs as well). For better or for worse, there are clear benefits with allowing the server to dictate locations because it means skills work correctly in regards to range. MMOs that don't use this method have to code a leash range for ranged skills, which gets into weird abuses where players skirt the leash range.

So all in all, we understand that rubber banding sucks and we've progressed a lot in terms of alleviating it, but it was an intended decision made after weighing the pros and cons.

Yannoa - Dreamweaver

Thank you for the response!

Interesting, so it's just a side-effect of the game's coding. I do hope we can find a way to fix it for good though, but it sounds like it's a hard problem to tackle.

Zarkin_Baxil - Raging Tide

Worst 2 spots I rubberband is around the towers in TW instance, and trying to Holy Path out of the pit after diging the flag in NW. It seems like it happens at the worst times. If any rubber banding gets fixed I hope it's these 2 instances.

genotypist

Zarkin_Baxil - Raging Tide wrote: »

Worst 2 spots I rubberband is around the towers in TW instance, and trying to Holy Path out of the pit after diging the flag in NW. It seems like it happens at the worst times. If any rubber banding gets fixed I hope it's these 2 instances.

I know this is asking a lot but can you get me a video of this Zarkin? I might be able to get more attention to it.

Zarkin_Baxil - Raging Tide

Sure, I will try my best to get a video of this happening. Not sure about the TW towers since map just reset and our faction won't be building towers for pve TW. I rubber band around our base towers when trying to attack catas that are attacking our towers. I'm sure I can get a video of the nation war rubber banding. One note, it seems that if the instance isn't full the rubberbanding dosen't happen.

Annalyse - Heavens Tear

The worst spot I have ever found for rubberbanding (and it remains to be so, for me) is in the Smythii valley in lunar, just across the first bridge. On the banks on either side of both bridges there is a horrible rubberbanding effect, so that if a mob runs there you cannot follow to kill it, and if you manage to get there you usually have to town portal to get out.... and occasionally it is bad enough that town portal won't even work. Relogging does not fix it either.

I haven't had much of a problem anywhere else (aside from if you land on the head of the tree NPC in luminance order in Morai), but that spot in lunar is a real annoyance and do hope it will be looked at. I have no idea how to take a video but I'll grab some screenshots next time I run the right path to show exactly where it is.

Salari - Raging Tide

A lot of rubber banding has nothing todo with the patch that is suggested above. It also comes from invisible objects left in the maps from unused items ect. I am surprised this was not mentioned from geno, Frankie had a sticky on the subject for quite a while so players could report the spots and was forwarded to the dev team in china. They removed alot of these objects but the thread was unstickied for some odd reason and the majority of rubber banding was pushed back to the reasoning of the patch. The dev team in china probably got tired of correcting their mistakes

midnightxxx

I know this post may be old, but i want to make something clear - The rubberbanding is not a user problem!
I've been there as the patch happend, i played originally on PM MY back then.
Normally there has never been any cause of rubberbanding ever before. The Patch changed the transit from ground-to-flying-mode. Before that, the game took like 2 seconds more to recognize a player is switching between ground and flying and you simply stood in mid-air while beeing under attack. It was like - the game notices - aha... you use wings now, air-mode right away!
Remember the animation when the character makes this awesome move to get on the flight? Yep, that was the full waiting time +1 sec. The charakter always started from that higher position, and not like today, when this animation can be skipped and makes the charakter startup out of the ground!
It felt like a switch has been broken, when the patch made it faster to get on wings and fly up. Those 2 secs were supposed to be livesaving in some situations, when u needed to get on your wings asap. But at the other hand it destroyed so much more with the rubberbanding as a terrible side-effect.
Im pretty sure it was all intended to patch the transition, getting rid of those 2 secs staying near the ground with wings on, while everything aound you could still attack you. The waitingtime costed charakters their lives so often, but so does the rubberbanding, as it occurs.

They will never try to find another solution, i guess.

obielle

Closed for necro.