How much bad game-play is lag?

Last night I had a competitive game on King’s Row where our Cassidy didn’t get a single elimination for an entire round save with his free ultimate on last point. After the match I re-watched the replay from his perspective to see what was going on and it was very clear from his movement that he was dealing with impossible lag. Like walking into walls, shooting at the floor, crosshair doing one frame flicks to random locations, standing in one place and not reacting while someone slowly shot him to death from behind.

I suspect this has happened before and I’ll definitely be looking for it going forward, but it makes me wonder how often this might be the problem with the players people call throwers and bots.

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People should probably not play competitive with such bad connections. It’s unfortunate that their situation is like that but that’s burdening other people unnecessarily.

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While true, depending on the issue, it can sneak up on you. I had it happen to me before and the game was literally unplayable as hitscan. I had to go Hanzo just to vaguely contribute. Obviously AFTER that I stopped until the problem was addressed. But it did not stop it from catching me with my pants down for that initial experience.

And then there was the other time Blizzard beamed me into the middle east. It had nothing to do with my internet, but that was almost as bad regardless.

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If it’s not a consistent thing and it starts happening after a match has started, that’s different, but if you know your connection is inconsistent, then yeah.

My connection has been the same since OW1 and the game runs fine unless I’m stacking with someone in Europe at peak times. Even so maybe once every fifty or so games I will just randomly get horrible lag and rubber-banding when in solo queue. I suspect it has more to do with Blizzard’s servers than my connection and I doubt I’m the only person this happens to.

If you’re in that position in comp you can’t leave without taking a penalty, and you can’t stay without throwing. Lose lose.

Are you sure it is not just a console player?

Also it could have been 1 time thing.

to this day overwatch dev haven’t fixed freezing issue with dual cpu laptop it suck

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Crossplay doesn’t exist in comp.

Yeah, i saw after that you mentioned comp.

Unless he is farming battlepass I doubt he is playing like that all the time. And even then he would probably have been playing qp.

I had cases where my pc will freeze or the ping will get very bad out of nowhere so most likely that is what happened… or maybe he was trying to play the game with a banana… who knows

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Depends on how bad you’re internet is lol. If you’re lagging with like 150+ latency, it can make it extremely difficult to play the game, no matter what hero.

The replay is flawed.

Lag on OW causes informations to be lost between the players and what’s going on on the server.
When you see someone running into a wall a not moving, its because the server keeps the information “forward” going even if the player, on their hands are pressing something else. Usually, as I suffer from lag sometimes, can tell you, on the player screen, the hero just stand stills, in the middle of the way.

It depends on what kind of lag that is. Cassidy can still be played with high latency as long as its stable. As he’s histcan, he would still need to aim on target he sees. Problem with high latency is that every heroes would either rollback or “dash” suddenly.

Recently started playing with some friends in another country, which puts me at 220 ms. :rofl: They’re new players, yet I’m the one dead last in stats every match. It’s borderline unplayable and loaded with visual glitches, so I really feel for the people who play at high ping long-term. Not sure how they could ever improve and they shouldn’t go into comp.

Having said that, projectile heroes still work to some extent which is expected. I’ve had good luck with Junk and Mei. Need to try Hanzo, Echo and Genji next.

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Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t the game tend to favour the player who is shooting, even if that player is lagging?

For example:

  • I’m a widow shooting at your head
  • You dodge my shot at the last instant
  • I’m lagging, so my client doesn’t receive that dodge before I shoot.
  • So from my client’s view I hit your head even though neither the server nor your client would see it that way.

In the above scenario, it’s my understanding that the game awards me a headshot and kills you.

Is this correct?

In theory yes. In practise if you’re rubber-banding to the point where you can’t even walk out of spawn properly, and the enemies are flickering like you’re in some EDM nightclub you won’t be getting that head-shot even on, ‘your end.’

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