What happens to the player who gets shot from behind cover? Is that not unfair to them?
It absolutely feels unfair. The victim sees themselves safely behind cover on their screen, but from the shooter's perspective (80ms in the past on their screen), they were still exposed when the shot was fired. The server validates the shooter's perspective, which means victims experience deaths that feel impossible. This is the honest cost of fairness to shooters — it shifts the unfairness burden to defenders.
Answered in
Time-Travel Fairness: How Servers Rewind for Lag CompensationWhy lag compensation rewinds the game world to when a shot was fired, and why victims experience the cost.
Read the full analysisOther questions this article answers
- Why does lag compensation exist at all? Can't players just aim for where the enemy is now?
- How does the server know what time the client fired the shot at?
- How far back can the server rewind? Can it go back 500ms or 1 second?
- What happens if the ring buffer doesn't have a snapshot for the timestamp on the packet?
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