Dear Bungie,
I have been playing Destiny since the Destiny 1 launch. I purchased the white Destiny bundle PS4 and all. It thought me about PvP. I love the Crucible FPS experience: it's the best there is.
About a year or so ago, the lag was so bad on PS4, I was about to quit. I had optimized my local network to have 30 ms lag with Montreal, the nearest city to me. Yet your matchmaking still kept giving the host to the laggy-est players, giving them an unfair advantage.
Then I discovered Google Stadia. Player base wise, it was the worst. I could basically only do Control, Survival and Trials. For survival we had to wait up to 15 mins for a match. In terms of the lag experience though, Stadia was the best Destiny experience I could ask for. There was basically no lag since both the peer to peer client and servers were running in the Google Cloud. If an opponent had a local network adding 500-2000 ms lag, the only one to suffer from this lag was them which is how it should be. When Stadia lags, its visual/input lag which is typically your own fault and you are the only one to suffer it. Stadia PVP matchers were lag proof. If you did have a lag advantage, it was no more than 50ms or at least it didn't feel like much of an advantage. All the players were in the US/Canada running on Google infrastructure. It was great!
Then you turned on mandatory cross-play. Now I have to play with XBOX and PS players. The player pool is enormous. I rarely wait more than 5 mins to get match made. But all those advantages are irrelevant given the RIDICULOUS amount of lag introduced in the game. Almost every game mode, even good old control, is a lag-fest.
What annoys me the most about this lag, is that your solution to it seems to obfuscate it as much as possible; addressing the symptom instead of the cause. If I hadn't played this game for the past 6 years, I might think that I just wasn't good enough anymore. But I have learned to see through the lag-obfuscation. I can see you accelerate my opponents movements to show me how I died a 500+ ms ago on [i]their[/i] physics servers. I call this phenomenon being [b]kill-cam'd[/b]. You know how in CoD they show you how the opponent killed you? You do the same thing to catch me up to how I died 500ms ago. I have already been dead a few 100 ms ago before I can even react to seeing my opponent. These animations of accelerated slide shots, jump one HC taps, etc. are just you filling me in, after the fact, on how I died on the XBOX physics hosts that the opponents are running on. Kill-cam'd.
The Destiny network code is a joke. In trials, you seem to put more effort into it, but the lag is still present. In 6v6 you don't even try to minimize the lag. I don't think its connection based at all at this point. Survival: you have forgotten exists.
I am just tired of spending all night looking for that one lobby that includes a majority of Stadia players like pre-cross-play. Only then can enjoy myself like the good old days. Otherwise, its ghost bullets and kill-cams all night.
Please Bungie, at least [b]remove cross-play from Control[/b]. Give me at least this one playlist pool were cross-play is deactivated. Control was working fine before, why cross-play it now? Cross-play for everything else is fine. Do this for us at least until you investigate the cross-play issues, which I am sure you are aware of. If not, at least make XBOX its own pool: the XBOX network is the worst culprit. I am sure you have internal charts showing you the massive increase in in-match quitting, severe network connection and network manipulation reports. I work in Data Science, I know you have all the data and some team somewhere in your organization knows about it. Ask around, maybe their manager has their head in the sand. I am sure you are also aware of the XBOX network inter-platform connectivity issues. Can't you see that no one is playing PvP right now?
Another thing. Please stop trying to invest so much effort into obfuscating lag. Your tricks have indeed succeeded in minimizing rubber-banding and teleportation. But its still all a lie as to the truth, which is what happens on the physics server. How can I be expected to fight when everything you display to me in my own little local bubble is a lie designed to disguise (poorly) the fact that opponents have a 500-2000ms advantage over me? Anyone that plays enough, knows it. At this point, you aren't fooling anyone but yourselves.
I know you know the grave state the Crucible is in. But are you appropriately prioritizing this issue? I think not.
We have had no new PvP maps in ages, and you took many away. Even minor crucible fixes take weeks to months to complete. I don't care about your PvE content. I don't really even care about Trials. At this point, Trials is more about flipping a coin to see who gets lag-advantage than skill. I just want to play Control without encountering severe lag every match.
I will not be purchasing the Witch Queen or making any effort to play this game until you have given Crucible the proper attention it deserves.
If you are working on these issues, and have an intermediate solution in the works, please let us know about. Transparency will go a long way to improve your bottom line.
To other primary crucible players out there, what is your experience in terms of lag in the crucible since cross-play went live?
In the hope that you may get the message,
Strife076
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True story