This game's netcode is really poor feeling (public)

[Plyme]

I've made this post already on the private feedback threads but decided to send it in bug reports as well in case more people wanted to share experiences/thoughts on this.


I live in Algeria and get around 70 to 90 ping to EU servers when i play and there's several things about how the game feels on this connection that upsets me compared to how other games feel online with some stuff being potentially match-ruining. I'm not going to pretend like I'm an expert on game networking because I'm not but i know very basic things and the feedback here reflects that.
in order of least important to most important:

1. Sinner's Sacrifice Timing delay

Since attacks are registered with a delay depending on your connection, the timing on Sinner's sacrifices jackpot can change or doesn't match the actual timing of your heavy melee, while this is a minor annoyance in most instances, if you heavy melee the final damaging stage of the Sinners and the jackpot stage appears with 6 lights already lit up, you cannot get the jackpot in that cycle depending on your connection and have to wait for the next cycle. Sinner's are something that doesn't move around and doesn't really get input from other players, In my head implementing a client side fix for this shouldn't be hard but again, I'm no expert

2. Breaking/Sliding through boxes

Breaking boxes by sliding is registered with a delay which feels awful past 70 ping as it'll stop your slide animation and momentum for a bit before rolling back to you actually having slid through with the correct momentum.
Boxes also don't really move so i can't imagine implementing a fix for this would be impossible.

3. Avoiding AOE Abilities

Needing to get out of range of walker stomp, Geist Bomb, Celeste 3 etc way early does not feel good, though i don't imagine this one can be fixed as easily, it still hurts my playing experience to have to deal with this significantly, and can very often be the cause of lost fights.

4. Secure/Deny mechanics

I first started noticing issues with this after the big November balance update which had changes to the secure deny lag calculations that claimed to "improve" it but all i've felt is just a disadvantage in actually being able to confirm my souls (i was pretty new to the game before this so maybe this problem always existed, but i digress), instances of me shooting my own soul orb, hearing the sound for it connecting, then it getting denied happen CONSTANTLY, 24/7. I wonder if this could be helped by just comparing both client side POV's a half second after the secure/deny happens (again, not an expert, but this is a major pain point in playing this game, as well as just extremely unfair)

5. Parrying melees/Puddle Punch

This one drives me completely up the wall, Parrying is registered with a delay meaning that players on higher ping just have to react faster, and players on lower ping just have better parries, shouldn't this be client side? sure it could be weird if a melee that hit on your screen suddenly jumped back a split second to being parried, but from a fairness perspective, the person who performed the parry fully deserves to actually have the parry succeed. A missed parry reaction like this can lose you a life and sometimes lose you the entire lane so i think its completely insane that players with better connections just have better parries. everything i said applies to parrying viscous puddle punch as well.

6. Overall hit registration

I'm sure this is a complex problem, but the way shooting guns in this game feels on connections above 60 ping is bad, the delay on registered hits combined with an overall poor link between shots on your screen that hit and actual damage dealt just makes me not play gun characters at all, the console shows bullet hit mismatches between client and server side and there have been many instances where i whiff shots that seem like they hit, or very clearly hit, go into the console and see bullet hit mismatches.
Other games i've played, namely something like Apex have hit registration that still feels great on very bad corrections, the movement suffers but the actual shooting feels great no matter the connection.

I really like playing this game but these issues are a source of constant frustration at best and unnecessary deaths at worst, i don't even want to play gun characters because of how poor the overall experience of shooting/hitreg actually feels right now.

 

[Timo]

Completely agree. I'm in Canada but I have 60ms of ping and it drives me crazy hearing the sound of confirm/denying souls or parrying sounds yet it doesn't register. I haven't experienced the sinners thing at all but I do seem to be doing slightly better in ping than you are.

 

[CDranzer]

Australian player, agree with basically all of these, especially the 6th point. The actual number feedback (i.e. how much damage you do) I understand being server side, because there may be factors the client doesn't know that determine if a shot actually did damage or not, but for the actual hit registration, you should at least get the little white ticks on the crosshair so you can tell if you're actually landing your hits or not.

I'll add another one for things like Venator's grenade - almost any kind of lobbed projectile has an apparent delay when it goes out.

I understand a lot of these things are balancing acts, and a question of how things look on the attacker side vs the defender side, but at least a few of them could be better.

The parry one is particularly tricky, though. To some extent this stuff comes with the territory of high latency.

 

[Plyme]

Australian player, agree with basically all of these, especially the 6th point. The actual number feedback (i.e. how much damage you do) I understand being server side, because there may be factors the client doesn't know that determine if a shot actually did damage or not, but for the actual hit registration, you should at least get the little white ticks on the crosshair so you can tell if you're actually landing your hits or not.

I'll add another one for things like Venator's grenade - almost any kind of lobbed projectile has an apparent delay when it goes out.

I understand a lot of these things are balancing acts, and a question of how things look on the attacker side vs the defender side, but at least a few of them could be better.

The parry one is particularly tricky, though. To some extent this stuff comes with the territory of high latency.

from a fairness perspective, prioritizing the client side for the parrier should always come first no? since they're the one properly executing the reaction, even if it means that the attacking player may see a melee hit that gets corrected to a parried melee. from a fairness and balance perspective it should prioritize the client side of the parrier unless i'm missing something in my logic.

even a grace period of 40 or so ms of client side priority would erase most of the frustration i have with parrying in this game

 

[CDranzer]

from a fairness perspective, prioritizing the client side for the parrier should always come first no? since they're the one properly executing the reaction, even if it means that the attacking player may see a melee hit that gets corrected to a parried melee. from a fairness and balance perspective it should prioritize the client side of the parrier unless i'm missing something in my logic.

even a grace period of 40 or so ms of client side priority would erase most of the frustration i have with parrying in this game

It's less about fairness and more about player perceptions I think.
I don't think most players will know or care if they get hit by bullets they technically "dodged", but I suspect a lot of players will probably notice if they got a punch off and were then parried a split second later.
Like don't get me wrong, I support the latency compensated option pretty much universally because I know how miserable it is to play without it, but I also understand the counter-arguments.

 

[Plyme]

UPDATE: THEY FIXED BOXES
sliding through boxes on all pings now feels extremely smooth, tysm to the developers

I'm gonna update this post periodically with clips of ridiculous parries being missed as a result of the delay

View attachment Deadlock - 2026-03-08 9-09-00 PM.mp4

 

[barlakopofai]

UPDATE: THEY FIXED BOXES
sliding through boxes on all pings now feels extremely smooth, tysm to the developers

I'm gonna update this post periodically with clips of ridiculous parries being missed as a result of the delay

View attachment 89826

To be fair, there is not a single person in this world who would prefer a game where you can ping abuse to get a better parry window. Maybe it's not such a smart idea to create so many reaction dependant inputs when you're Valve with Valve servers and there is basically a 100% guarantee that they will never work correctly or with any consistency.

 

[CDranzer]

Incidentally, I decided to do some more testing using the net_fakelag command.

I was under the impression that bullets were latency compensated. It turns out, they're latency compensated when shooting Troopers, but not when shooting players (or at least, the bots in the sandbox).

This leads to a bizarre situation where you have to lead shots for against players to account for latency, but not against troopers.

I have no idea if this is intentional or not.

 

[Peacemaker]

EU Player here, so I have a rather good Ping, but even I experience these issues. From a missed Parry to being hit outside of range sometimes as well. Seems to be some combination from Server and Client side.

I can dodge out of an AOE, but still register inside it. Parry and still get hit, and even just dodge out of the way of some things and yet I still get hit. Hell, I have been hit behind walls as well. The hittracking in this game sucks when you compile all of that, and I am thinking of just stoppin atp, cause I can't change anything on my end except maybe try buying expensive components, and that isn't worth it.

So I would say some checks should be done on Client and Server side to verify that the client side wasn't already farther out than the Server side. A simple latency spike can already cause issues like these were they desync a milisec and that is when you then get hit as the Server just drags you back.

Hell, I had the Silver 2 just move me in place. I had the animation, the sound effects, but I was just hovering mid air till it ended and I was back to norrmal as if I had missed it.

 

[Plyme]

To be fair, there is not a single person in this world who would prefer a game where you can ping abuse to get a better parry window. Maybe it's not such a smart idea to create so many reaction dependant inputs when you're Valve with Valve servers and there is basically a 100% guarantee that they will never work correctly or with any consistency.

that's really not what i'm asking, though there would be a bit of an issue with how its displayed on the others screen, it should be perfectly possible to make it the same window regardless of ping, and not fully prioritizing client side view for the start of the parry and maybe only doing so for a window of 50 or so milliseconds would help the visuals not look too jarring when its eventually displayed on the other's screen

 

[Plyme]

Played games specifically yesterday and the hit reg on around 80 ping felt way worse than usual