Season 8 has the worst servers since the netcode leaf era. I encounter people dramaticly warping 10 times more then before. Even if you look trough a scope long distance and watch closely, the people aren't even running smoothly. There are small warps all the time. I think everyone who ever played competitive on the highest level, laughs when Apex Legends calls itself a competitive game.
Since the beginning of apex i allready noticed something fishy, because the people in my lobbies were speaking all kinds of languages except that of my own or neighbouring countries. From a performance perspective it's allready a mistake to put long distance connections all together in the same playfield, imo.
I say this because back in the day, we wouldn't even start a compo/war if one of the players had a ping above 60ms. Because we were playing a fast moving shooter. I believe Apex also categorises as that, so the network performance should be optimal in order to have fair games. I understand in the beginning of the game playerbase might have been a problem, but i assume we are over that, so they should adapt or at least give serious players more options to pick themself, like you mentioned.
All servers technicalities put aside, i believe the other main reason that developers don't invest time or effort into top tier connections or performance, is because of the lag compensation they incorperate into every game these days. Bad connections get almost fully camouflaged this way, so everyone who never played without it, won't actually realise what they are doing, and think everything is fine.
Back when it didn't excist, everything happened serverside, so you could actually SEE how bad your ping was, because if your ping for example was 150ms, it would take 150ms between pressing the "FIRE" button and the moment your bullets start flying out of your gun. Then everyone would be complaining how bad the connection is because 150ms is huge in a fast shooter.
But now all games have lag compensation and what happens on your screen gets sent to the server. I'm not sure how Apex incorperated this, but usually it comes down to this: instead of manually having to adjust your aim to compensate for the lag, you can just shoot at the enemy and if the bullets hit on your screen, it gets sent to the server.
This surely looks a lot smoother and more pleasant, but you also have no idea how bad your connection really is. That's why you often the feeling you get shot while you're allready behind cover. Or how someone shot a full clip into you, while he hardly appeared on your screen for a split second. Or how you both kill eachother at the same time but the one with the best connection wins. Add these kind of things to the sound also being played in delay, and to be fair, very often there is a huge lack of fairplay, because you are hard done by the game. And yeah you could argue, everyone encounters these problems, but that brings us back to the first point. If gameplay is not consistant then it's not a competitive game.
@fuzzykeuhLag compensation is adding time stamps to actions to be sorted in the correct order and processed / confirmed by the server with better precision. Without it , there would be way more "no reg" complaints, coming even from low ping players. Anyway, it is limited, you just need to play at a high ping and you will experience a high amount of shots getting hit markers but no damage confirmation.
Before lag compensation, it really wasn't everything serverside, but quite the opposite. Often, one of the players was the host, therefore gaining an immense advantage of having an almost inexistent delay, but also become a game breaking problem when crashing or leaving early. Clients had the authority on their actions, giving others less time to react and having more handles exposed for them to use for cheats. Hackers were actually able to curve their bullets trajectory, had they wished to do so. All in all, it wasn't a balanced experience at all.
Ping limitation sounds like a good thing, but it can be a game killer. It can shatter the playerbase into many bits, which would then dissolve rapidly due to lack of players in certain areas, long waiting times in others and SBMM ineffectiveness. A lot of those who think their connection is supreme would realize how unstable the network actually is, after getting kicked out or refused by servers every time there are issues. Actually, I'm wrong, they would blame the servers for this, as always, duhhh!
I don't know if they already did this, but it may be good improvement to reduce both server and client CPU workload:
Bullets have a max traveling distance depending on weapon, and also depending on line of sight (LoS) or aiming down sights (ADS). Client and server should only take care of the objects that are within these 3 variables, and details should be rendered according to them:
IMO, something must be done about netcode, the servers or both, and I'm sorry @DoYaSeeMe but as end users we actually don't care why EA/Respawn think they have in place the best solution when the fact is that every mainstream FPS game performs better than Apex Legends with far less budget (battlefield 1 is a good example).
