What is the field of protection on knockdown shields?

As far as i know knockdown shield have some significant delay between visual and actual protection. It affects not only moment of switching it on, but also it's angle change - to successfully protect yourself from being finished off you have to try to predict the point of enemy next shot and turn towards it significantly before the shot happens.
I'd say devs should've been asked about this long ago, if it's balance feature, server tickrate issue or just an animation-caused bug.

The knockdown shield protects somewhere around 160 degrees in front of you. As you turn to protect yourself, there is a bit of a delay, so the enemy player is able to hit your side before your knockdown shield moves to protect that area.

As for being hit directly through the knockdown as if it doesn't exist, that's a cheat called soft aimbot, where the player is "missing", but their bullets fly and snap to you.

Normal aimbot hits a player without missing, soft aimbot makes it look like the cheater is missing, but their shots are curving midair to hit you, that's also why we get most of the "shot behind cover" issues. The other part of that is terrible servers that favors the shooter.

However, I have noticed that in some cases you can just poke your gun through the player's knockdown shield and it renders the knockdown shield useless.

So, in short: The shield either didn't protect you due to a delay, bug, or cheats.

@drevinum9 I will say that normal players who aim will have bullet lines that look curved if they're moving side to side. This is just how the bullet lines are drawn from the gun. Also, players who are shooting at you while they run around you aren't using a cheat, and this is because of a movement delay. As you rotate to block a player's shots, you visually see that you're blocking their bullets, but on their side of things, (which I've been on the shooter's side of things before), you're not turning fast enough and its very easy to flank a knocked down player.

Now, if the player is directly in front of you, and you see the knockdown shield take little to no damage, and they're somehow hitting your health directly, (and neither of you are moving around), that's mainly a cheat. I say mainly because there can be a lag delay between putting up the knockdown shield and it being fully deployed. However, knockdown shields have been broken in more ways than one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxHNrNAq6sg (Bug or cheat, I'm unsure)
https://answers.ea.com/t5/General-Feedback/Knockdown-Shields-Are-Useless/m-p/11075818/highlight/true#M90572 (My guess is that there was a input lag delay and the server thinking my knockdown wasn't deployed)

If you're seeing a player land shots, and those shots weren't reasonably possible, and it clearly wasn't lag, delays, etc., its safe to assume its soft aimbot. In the beginning, most cheaters used aimbot, the original one where they lock onto you perfectly and never miss.

Now cheaters are using a combination of 3 different things:

1) Aimbot
2) Soft Aimbot
3) Legit Shooting

If the cheater is trying to look legit and not get banned, (that's assuming the anticheat is decent), they'll switch from aimbot to soft aimbot when being spectated before turning off the cheats, as a direct switch from aimbot to no aimbot would be completely obvious.

Considering that the game has many types of cheats, its not hard for me to believe that there's a anti-knockdown cheat.

I've seen players shoot faster than a gun allows, grenades automatically blowing up upon impact no matter how much time passed since it was thrown, players using two guns at once, (which got patched out, thank you Respawn), forcing your spectation on another team, so you can't record and report, etc.

Most of these cheats are not widely used, (like speed hacking and spawning in items such as armor), and some of them, (like self reviving without the old golden knockdown ability and dual wielding guns), are no longer used because its simply impossible to do so now.

I also wouldn't jump ship and hope for the game to die out, because unfortunately these kinds of cheats exists in pretty much any game. Also unfortunately, the game uses EAC, which every cheater can basically bypass with ease.

There's supposedly an EA anti-cheat that newer games will be getting instead, if there is, I hope they try it on Apex.