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 (T...
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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.
It wasn't a rare occurrence at all for me. TTD was so fast that I couldn't move my character at all after receiving the first indication of damage. Meanwhile, enemies would eat 10 bullets, then start to move, run around in literal circles, jump, had no movement penalties, and if anything looked like thy could move faster than what was physically possible in the game, just like in the 2042 beta. When I get shot, it feels like I'm being held in place.
This isn't a matter of seeing a player, getting into a gunfight, thinking they're missing because you're not receiving damage, to then get all the damage updates in one tick. What must be happening is huge amounts of desync. To the point that I can barely get a glimpse of an enemy before they kill me. The only way that's possible is if the server is not showing me their characters position accurately, and that player actually pushed the corner a full second before they were visible to me. This happens quite a bit in 2042 to this day. The desync is so bad at times that it could probably be measure in the seconds. It's not even close to being accurate, for a shooter at least.
TTK felt great when it was working correctly, but unfortunately, many times it was not. People were just standing still in the first beta weekend, and would just eat damage. It's not hard to hit someone center mass with an SMG 10 meters out, especially if you catch them off guard. So it has nothing to do with spread or recoil.
Like I keep saying, BF6 netcode feels exactly the same as it did in 2042. No difference whatsoever. So it's actually worse by a good margin! Why? Because 2042 had faster movement, low tick servers, and was designed to host 128 players. BF6 feeling just as bad as 2042 means they actually made it worse somehow.
Battlefield 2042 did have slower TTK than the Battlefield 6 beta. My guess is that the prevalence of weapons like the M4A1 played a huge role. High firerate weapons have traditionally been a major issue when it comes to a fast TTD.
It's quite possible that with larger maps and people using a larger variety of weapons, including those with a lower firerate will make the issue less noticeable.
Higher ROF weapons have always performed much better in BF games regarding the hit reg. It's been like that forever. Makes sense, more chances for the bullets to register, and more of them will land within a tick.
It won't change unless Dice does something to change it. The desync makes the game borderline unplayable at times. Even when there was 200k plus players online, I had 20-30ms of ping, no packet loss, so it didn't matter how good my connection was, it was miserable because the way the netcode has been designed. They need to dial back the lag comp or something.
I just had a round in 2042 where I was dying behind cover every encounter. It's unacceptable in my opinion. I understand an online game with a good amount of players will have some BS from time to time, but it was every single gunfight. I couldn't see half the people that killed me. Just dead. It was Haven Close Quarters FWIW. Dice can and needs to do better. I don't understand how people can put up with this, it's maddening.
Yeah, as I mentioned, the experience may vary. For me, the obvious server/netcode issues were just a rare occurrence. It's worth to be said that I have such problems in BF2042 rarely either, so I cannot objectively compare if it's better or worse than that (but it's reasonable to expect the netcode for BF6 is more or less same as for BF2042, probably with some minor adjustments and improvements, as there is no point to completely rewrite it). It's entirely possible that some combination of ISPs (also of other players) and geolocation can make it worse.
