We need to talk about dedicated servers.
It is extremely unfun to play a game and be constantly hit through pallets and windows when you clearly should not be, such as when you finished the animation and already started running away. Especially since at a high level mindgaming vaults and pallets and baiting for stuns is extremely important for survivor, and wasting pallets early can ruin the game for your team. Newer maps such as Hawkins and the Saloon have many extremely unsafe pallets where quick reactions are necessary to survive. I play on NA servers yet I get killers from the Middle East, China, Japan, Korea, and Russia consistently. It is extremely unfair and arguably worse than lag switching since it happened to me maybe twice and it was more of a funny moment than actually frustrating. Playing VPNing killers or killers that have lag spikes is much more common and infuriating. I suggest a number of solutions:
- Change hit detection to server side as opposed to client side. This will probably be the most difficult, however it would likely be the best for overall game health. The devs have said they do not want killers to feel cheated out of hits on their screen. However, cheating survivors out of hits isn't a much better solution, especially since it affects four players instead of one. This way if the killer has a lag spike or chooses to VPN they will be punished as opposed to rewarded with unfair hits.
- Allow survivors in lobby to see killers ping in relation to the server. This will most likely be fairly simple to implement, and allows survivors to make informed decisions with the killers ping. Saying that a lobby has 30 ping means nothing when the killer is from China, has 400 ping to server, and can hit you 5 seconds after you fast vault a window. However, killers that have lag spikes will still have an advantage as long as the hit detection remains client side.
- Set a hard limit on who can access servers in a location. If a killer has over a certain ping to a server they should not be allowed to make a lobby and force survivors to play a laggy game (Thanks DC penalty). We can also ban VPNing killers but this would take a while and likely be difficult to prove.