The biggest reason why I might stop playing soon is the cheating problem. Cheaters are basically flooding every single server, (some more than others).
I've played the game on the following servers:
- St Louis
- Iowa GCE 1 through 4
- Dallas
- London
- Tokyo GCE 1
- Sydney
- Bahrain 1
- Hong Kong
I've found the following:
- St Louis, Iowa, and Dallas have A TON of lag, despite being servers within my region. There are about 3-6 cheaters every single match no matter the game mode or time of day. Some of the cheaters names are Japanese, Chinese, or Russian. I see a lot of below level 50's on the servers within my region.
- London is a bit laggy, but not as much as the "local" servers, and I've ran into 1-3 cheaters every single match. Same as the servers above, the cheaters are in any mode at any time, and some of the cheater's names are Japanese, Chinese, or Russian. However, I didn't see a lot of smurfs.
- Tokyo felt way less laggy than London, and the time of day does impact when cheating is at its peak. During Tokyo's daytime, or around 3pm-10pm for me, cheaters flood the servers. However during the mornings when its 5am-8am for me, there doesn't seem to be a lot of cheaters on the servers. However, despite being less laggy most of the time, its more prone to lag spiking and rubberbanding, which makes sense due to my region and where the server is located. Most of the players I've saw were below level 30.
- Sydney and Bahrain were beyond laggy and was unplayable when it came down to the cheaters and smurfs, (at least when I attempted to play on these servers).
- Hong Kong has just as much lag as Tokyo does for me, however during the mornings for Hong Kong, its flooded with a ton of bots that just stand there and punch the air. There's cheaters farming them for kills, and apparently if you kill these bots yourself, they report you for "cheating", which has gotten some players banned already. These bots are also said to be online 24/7, 7 days a week. How is that not detected as a bot? They do the same thing every single match, every hour of every day.
When the time rolls around where players get on this server, matches go from 30+ bots out of 60 players in Battle Royal with around 12+ cheaters to 1-5 bots, and 20+ cheaters. Almost every single account I saw were below level 20.
I've heard a lot of players within the region had switched servers to North America ones, and I wondered why at first. However after playing a few matches on the Hong Kong server, it was quite obvious that it has a major cheating problem.
TL;DR: No matter the time, server, or mode, you will always have your match ruined by cheaters, smurfs, and bots. The only difference is that some servers will have more cheaters on it than others based on the region and time of day. I'm sure that if I tried every single server out, the outcome would be the same, unplayable due to cheaters, smurfs, and bots.
I'm sure someone is going to mention things such as ping, and about that... it doesn't seem to matter. I say that because servers I'm the cloest to lag like they're on the moon. One of the servers, (I won't say which one), is about an hour and a half away from me. When I connect to this server, the main menu says I have a ping of around 26ms, but in the lobby and during a match, the ping says its over 128ms at any given time. When I play on distant servers, I seem to have less lag but tend to rubberband more. I seem to also die quicker on servers near me compared to others, (which is why I don't say there isn't lag compensation because there totally is).
Your connection to any given server appears to be as follows:
- A good connection puts you in situations where you'll get shot around corners by higher ping players, get no regs on said higher ping players more often than not, and for some reason... way more lag
- A bad connection still gives you lag, and maybe every single red icon in the phone book, but it also lets you hit players after they went behind cover since you can still see them on your screen, get hit less often, and from my experience, I would go to reload after missing every single shot, and then I see that I somehow knocked a player who just ran into a building and closed a door RIGHT when I hit the reload button. Like... come on... I missed every single shot, how did I even get a knock? Well because of lag compensation. At some point I must of hit the player and it all got registered as a knock. This only ever seems to happen when I play on servers further away, such as Tokyo, so I try not to play on other servers unless the ques are slow within my region.
I will also note that some players I've talked to, (and those I've heard from), have different experiences when it comes to lag compensation. Some say that having a higher ping is a disadvantage and thus lag compensation doesn't exist, while others say it does exist, as they're unable to hit higher pinged players most of the time, while getting beamed even after running behind cover.
I know some players have even suggested region locking servers. While region locking servers sounds nice, the main problem would then be legit players getting region locked to a server filled mainly with cheaters. There's a reason why a lot of the Hong Kong region players came to the North America servers in the first place. They don't want to deal with the cheaters as much as the rest of us do.
