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ghostflux's avatar
ghostflux
Seasoned Adventurer
2 days ago

Time to death

Many of you will already be familiar with the term Time To Death (TTD), but I'll shortly summarize it to ensure we are all talking about the same thing. Every weapon in the game has a Time To Kill (TTK): The time it takes to kill an opponent, assuming that:

  • You have 100% accuracy.
  • You are at a range that applies the maximum damage of a bullet. Bullet drop and damage fall-off is not taken into account.
  • You are firing as quickly as the weapon is able to theoretically support. 
  • You are firing at any of the body parts that have a 1x multiplier attached to it. While not every Battlefield game works the same, it's usually a part of the torso and the arms.

Time to Death, for the purposes of this discussion is the time it takes for an opponent to kill you, from your own perspective. Your opponent is an exact copy of yourself, with the exact same weapon and loadout.

In a perfect world, where all data is instantly transmitted and processed, the TTD should be exactly equal to the TTK, for both you and your opponent. Unfortunately, this is not the case and there is always latency. 

When two people start shooting, the server needs to verify who started to shoot first and award the damage and/or kill to that person. There is also lag compensation and prediction to combat latency, but that's a pretty complex subject, that won't be covered in this thread. 

There may be cases where the server has already verified that a player was killed, but the client of the killed player has not received that data yet. On their screen, they may still be shooting or applying other forms of damage. The server then invalidates that damage. This is to mitigate, but not prevent situations where two players simultaneously kill each other.

The client of the killed player then receives the corrected data from the server, but that data may already be older than what they are seeing on their screen. This creates a disconnect, where the client has to "catch up" to events that have already happened. This can lead to the perception that you were able to hit a significant amount of bullets, yet your opponent didn't die, but you suddenly did. In addition to this, there may be further issues with the netcode, where all of this data is applied at once, leading to the impression that you're being instantly killed by only a few shots of your enemy.

What I've noticed from playing Battlefield 2042 lately, is that there's a massive amount of unexplained latency. Where I have a 20-25 millisecond connection, with minimal packet loss. In the overwhelming amount of  situations I still feel like I'm hitting 3x to 4x as many shots as my opponents, only for my opponent to turn around and instantly shoot me.

Just as a bit of a disclaimer, I am well aware of how recoil and spread affect my weapon performance and how to compensate. I also have at a minimum of 3 gold marks on almost every primary weapon in the game. I have a decent grasp of the statistics of every weapon and I try to fairly and accurately gauge my own skill level compared to my opponent. I am not afraid to admit when somebody is better than me.

That said, I'm certainly expecting some latency, but not that much. So my question is a simple one. What is being done in Battlefield 6 to ensure that the experience is better than in Battlefield 2042? Is it known why Battlefield 2042 is such a mess and will Battlefield 6 be the same?

 

Note: Due to the technical nature of this discussion, please feel free to correct me if you think that I've incorrectly described something and I'll see whether I can correct the original post.

1 Reply

  • Anaghya's avatar
    Anaghya
    Seasoned Veteran
    2 days ago

    As I noticed during the BF6 beta, the experience was differing between people (but I suspect that many complaints "TTK is too slow" were caused by bullet spread/trigger control than technical issues or TTK being actually slow (because "on the paper" it had pretty quick TTK)). 
    In my case, an issue with the quick TTD (bullets registering at once) was very rare and an issue with slow TTK (bullets registering late or not at all) was a rare occurrence as well. Except those few cases, it was behaving as expected and I suppose such issues will be ironed out for the release. Of course, the problems may still happen under a full load of players temporarily, but based on the beta experience, I am not expecting any issues if this kind in general, as a systemic problem.

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