Sparring, a lag competition?
 

Over the passed few years, legit sparring has faded into a huge lag competition.
Other than it being actual skill, all you need to do is lag your internet than spar in such a technique, you are almost unbeatable by the average player.
It's just ridiculous on how players who have 200+ MS think they are the top10 sparrers on Graal just because they can warp behind you than all of the sudden hit you. It's basically the person with the best lag basically dominates everyone.
To fix this. . .UN should get it's own hit detection script; one that is far more accurate, or at least prevent people from sparring if they have [89-100[ MS.
I, myself, isn't a sparrer but I just find it dumb that nice-fair and clear sparring was taken over by internet lag.
This doesn't just go for UN but for any other server with 1v1 competition.

Comments? Feedback?

no

I don't think there is any way to make HD more accurate... you can't get rid of lag, therefor you can't get rid of the effect lag has player interaction(AKA HD). You could serverside it, but you still get lag problems(see what Classic had dealt with for a LONG time).

I think a nice addition would be screwing with the rating system, and having the gained rating for winning scaled from 25-100%, depending on the last check(when the spar ends?) of their ping. <50ms would mean you gained 100% of your due rating, and >300ms would mean you'd only get 25% of your 'gained' rating from winning. Anything between those numbers would scale accordingly.

Over the past years? Lag has always been around on Graal. I can't see how it has gotten "worse" It's always seem consistent.

He is right though. More and more people are tending to lag. Could be intentional.

If you're considered a 'good legit sparrer' you would be able to beat people who lag, delay, skip, and etc. There has always been laggers on EVERY server and just because they lag does not mean that they are any good. I know I can personally beat most laggers.

I agree, there has always been lag but now it's just getting worse.
. . . and being good at sparring does not refer you to being good at fighting a lagger. It's two different styles/techniques when fighting, you wont fight a lagger as you do to a normal person, will you?

Learn to anticipate their actions, and lead your slashes. Finally don't spar intentional laggers.

Leading your hit's isn't as easy as it sounds. Players tend to "trick" you out, so leading can just resolve into you being hit.

They are inevitable to fight in spar tournies.

I don't think he means the lag is getting worse, but the people are -- they are intentionally lagging up their connection to get the upper hand.

Then perhaps UN needs to take better precautions to people using net limiters, and tapping.

I'd probably make a utility console for ping, and watch their ping before sparring, during, and after. Do this for a few spars, and you should be able to get an idea if they're doing it intentionally or not.

This is pretty much what an entire spar tournament consists of on UN. It is something that should have been policed for a long time now, though many of the leading participants tend to be in cahoots with one or more staff members.

Please note that I do not say this simply to rant about the staff, as I just have this silly expectation of seeing some sort of professionalism on Graal someday. It would make UN a better place which is ultimately what's important.

Graal will never have professionalism when 12 year olds can be staff members.

I don't think it's a specific age so much as it's Administrative staff not gauging maturity correctly. Even in real life, quite a few of the younger staff I've hired have outperformed their older counterparts. Ultimately (and within reason) it's going to depend upon, and should be evaluated on, an individual basis. :cool:

They should come down hard on laggers; don't allow them in the spar, don't allow them in events, don't allow them to enter tournaments. I can guarantee if something like that was enforced, 90 percent of the people who lag on the server would suddenly walk around lag free, with the remaining 10 percent actually attempting to fix whatever is lagging them.

I have no clue if intentional lag can really be traced down. For example, I am on a wireless connection and my connection won't always ping great for whatever reason from someone else downloading on the same network to frequency changes in the wireless box itself.

But then again, if the unintentional lag is extreme such as someone like BlobZ's, that sort of connection shouldn't be tolerated at all.

you can still beat those international laggers who intentionally lag themselves, it's just hard. it doesn't make them invincible, just harder to hit since they might have a literal 6 second delay. honestly a lag-cap limit should be implemented, so if you reach over a certain amount of perceivable lag, then you are disconnected until it gets under. this way laggers could still play, you know the ones who actually have lag since they are over seas, and the intentional laggers would get disconnected. obviously there will be some controversy in how much to limit and such, but it is discouraging to those sparrers who can't beat laggers if people can lag and win

honestly i don't have a problem sparring people like blobz since i still win a lot of the time

I am overseas and my ping on UN averages at around 100. I doubt that any form of comedown for laggers (with the type of pings that are being suggested) would ever effect people who are just overseas.

Hiro, that's you. What about all the other players? A player like you, with years and years of sparring experience understands how to defeat a lagger but what about the others? BlobZ, when he boosts himself up to 2.1k rate by obtaining streaks in spar. That's a wide load of people he beat, over and over again.
Then you have players who consistently frog-warp, these are the most annoying. They tend to move faster, and when just you hit them, think again. They warp around you and hit you as if it was nothing.
I know what it's like having a horrible internet connection, in fact I won UTC on UN with dial-up lag and boy, was it ever easy.

This is really the only solution..

Lag caps where it's needed as well, there's functionality to implement it now.

If they do implement such a system, they should add a spar for people with [0-50[ MS than another spar for [50-100[ and so on.

oh, i agree that people lagging themselves is a problem for new or less experienced sparrers. there just needs to be a way to limit their ability to do so

well that's positive then. the only way i could see a lag-limit being burdensome is against people who just naturally have lag, but if that isn't a problem (the limit only needs to disconnect those with outrageous amounts of lag) then i don't see why UN wouldn't try to implement some sort of limit on lag

...then again it seems like UN hasn't cared about it's sparring community since about, two-three managers ago? the idling and newbie community might not need it the limit, so they might not implement it

All UN's management/developers care about now are events, and bigger events.

which is why i tried suggesting some SPAR EVENTS but they never went for it; i'm sure the thread is easy enough to find for the leagues. apparently they are "completely focused" on that new town wikkid built but never finished, and now they are going to finish it except unless it's going to replace or add something that isn't already in TC then it probably won't be used much after it's release.

spar mods could be given a bit more responsibility in running leagues in the abandoned upper spar of TC spar, UN staff just has to make it happen, but they don't seem to be going for it

on a more related note, i don't think the lag problem can explain staff's lack of support in sparring. it's not that people lag is the problem, it's that people can make themselves lag so easily whenever they want and get away with it, like it's another sparring technique

That's still an event hiro. (I'm not saying it's a bad idea. I don't see why they would have to do anything for it when players in the past have organized spar leagues) They should focus on things such as decently made quests and properly removing some of their lamer NPC's.

i'm not talking about any other problems UN has, just generally that since they have sparring there and active, they should use utilize it. how long do you think it would take their staff to change upper TC into a league-able level, add in a lag-control NPC (however they decided to do it), and start making a better use of what graal has to do instead of...whatever the hell there is to do on UN?

I agree with Hiro.
What I find dumb tho is that lagging yourself can't get you kicked from an event, lol!

I still stick with my idea of having a separate sparring arena for different pings ^_^.

Start a torrent, win a spar. Its a hell of a tactic.

Modem tapping is coming into play recently, it's quite sad. x-x

it ain't recent

Graal's movement is clientside and it just spams the server with positional packets whenever it feels like it. So hooray, you can't fix it unless you make movement serverside and interpolated on your client, which will NOT work considering you accelerate instantly.

you guys cry to much

UN's hit detection always chooses the other player's hit over mine, when really it should be a tying hit.