Jousting: How to?

[Drakaris]

The biggest problem with jousting is that the higher your latency, the lower your window of opportunity is and also the more variance your latency will have, so your optimal hit window is never the same every time.

If you joust a standing NPC with high latency, if you attack too soon, the client rejects you saying that you are too far away. If you attack on queue your client doesn't register an error, but the attack command gets rejected server side because you are no longer in melee range when the server receives the command and does a secondary client check (I think the sync code does 2 checks for every command executed, which is why your UI locks if you cast a spell when lagging out). So the window of opportunity for high ping users is unrealistically small and varies considerable depending on the varying latency.

Solution? They need to implement server side code to make hitboxes vary depending on latency, or they need to remove the client check for melee range so that you can attack when running through and when the server does the internal checks, the attack can be made with guess work.

Also the sync code is pretty shit for zoning too, it takes some players 3-4x as long to zone even with SSD or ramdisk. Solution: use a static zone timer (eg 30 seconds) with a variance of 15 seconds .