Unusable Skill Bug

Hey guys,

We've been getting a few reports of issues with skills not being usable. To expedite a fix we'd like to gather some information from the community. There are two classifications of issues at hand.

1) Player spawns and skills work, but mid-life they stop working. They may not work again until you die and respawn.
2) Player spawns but skills and/or weapons are not available for some number of seconds.

These are separate bugs, and for this forum post we're going to focus on only the first issue. If anyone who has experienced the issue could answer some or all of the following questions it will be very useful.

1) What class or classes have you experienced a skill lockout issue with?
2) What skills were affected? Was it only the one skill (assassin dash is a known culprit) or was it all of them?
3) What were you doing before the skill stopped working? (juicing, grappling, hacking, etc)
4) Did the skill start working within that life or was it unusable until respawning?
5) Were you playing single-player blitz, as a client, or as a server?
6) If you were a client what kind of ping did you have to the server?

Any extra information to help us reliably reproduce the issues in a dev environment will be greatly appreciated. If anyone is feel frisky what we'd really like to see is fraps footage (http://www.fraps.com/) of the issue happening. In particular we would love to see the ~10 seconds of action leading up to the point where the skill stops working. If anyone can capture this and send us a youtube link that would be phenomenal.

Thanks everyone.

- ForrestTheWoods

1) Assassin
2) Dash
3) No idea
4) Unusable until respawn
5) Client (crossfire)
6) Not sure. I usually stick to <60ms servers, but maybe the rare times this has happened have also been the rare times I've played on higher ping servers

It's only happened to me 2 or 3 times, and not any time recently.

1) Assault, Assassin, Support
2) Bomb, Dash, Hack (i.e. I've only seen it happen with the "Blue" skill.) The Assassin's lunge is also affected.
3) Nothing..I've only experienced this bug *immediately* after spawning and I believe I've only ever seen it at the *very* start of a round.
4) Unusable for the duration of that "life." Dying fixes it.
5) Client on a dedicated Crossfire server.
6) I generally only play on sub-70 ping servers.

Another really important note: when I see this bug, I usually see complaints from other players on the server experiencing the same thing. Again: this has always been at the VERY start of a match, and it fixes when they die.

I would have to say this is exactly which class it happens to me to, and no, I haven't seen the bug recently. In fact, I'm not seeing it as often or some days never at all.

Also, for number 3: I've usually had it after a grapple, or some animation, maybe even sometimes after a lunge or 2. So my guess would be lunge or grapple is causing it for me. I don't think it has ever come "all the sudden".

I already emailed Forrest with this link, but I wanted other Assassins to take a look and pretty much say if it's the same glitch

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPVkBeUVlVM

starts at the 1 minute mark

1- assassin
2- dash and lunge
3- 80% of the time i was just grappled to death, few times just shot to death as normal
4- cant use till respawn
5- crossfire dedicated server
6- 60

This bug has always been present, though with latest patch it seems to occure more frequently and mostly after a grapple death animation.

1) What class or classes have you experienced a skill lockout issue with?
Assault.

2) What skills were affected? Was it only the one skill (assassin dash is a known culprit) or was it all of them?
Bomb Only.

3) What were you doing before the skill stopped working? (juicing, grappling, hacking, etc)
I had just spawned, start of a new game.

4) Did the skill start working within that life or was it unusable until respawning?
No, it was unusable until I respawned.

5) Were you playing single-player blitz, as a client, or as a server?
Crossfire, dedicated server.

6) If you were a client what kind of ping did you have to the server?
Approx 50.

This happened for the first time last night at the start of a new game, I also use Fraps so will try and capture this if it happens again.

Edit:
This could be nothing but I'll mention it anyway, when this happens the other assault players on the team throw a bomb in the spawn area, are they experiencing the same thing and if so could it either be a server delay or command delay?

1) Assassin
2) Dash
3) Nothing special I can think of - happens to me at least once in every single game I play as assassin (which is main reason why I now "main" tank!). If I had to make an assumption, it would be something related to lunging and landing on ground of a different vertical height.
4) Sometimes I get it back within the life, but only temporarily (longest I've had it "come back" for was about a minute). Death is the only guaranteed fix.
5) No, only seen it in crossfire as a client though I rarely play blitz/host anything.
6) Happens on 50 ms just as often as on 200 ms

Video of it in action + lead up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wm3hQR-D4yo

I'll record a few more games and upload them soon.

Hey guys,

Just wanted to chime in and say that thanks to your feedback and videos we can now reliably reproduce this in a dev environment.

- ForrestTheWoods

Awesome!

Can you say what you're doing to reproduce it, so we can avoid doing that?

umm... from what I've experienced... avoid playing your *** off! lol

Hitting dash and immediately lunging into a target can cause issues as a client. Lunging into a target after you've dashed for a moment is fine. It's the combination of doing both near simultaneously and hitting something as a client that is problematic.

A fix is in the works.

I hate to make another thread for this, but sometimes the lunge is bugged. If I spam lunge too often, once in awhile I'll get a "short/slow lunge". It gets me killed quite often.

Any chance this could be addressed soon after?


Example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhq1OwdHi-k @ 10:08

I get those too sometimes. The behavior of lunge is heavily influenced by lag, everything from when/where it stops on contact to how far and fast it goes.

When I played on 360, I eventually refused to play assassin unless I was lucky enough to be hosting because of how awful the lagged lunge was.

I'm just glad that having low-ping dedicated servers in the PC version alleviates most of the issues. Still not perfect, but good

However, I was on a Dallas server, and I live in Dallas. I should have the superior ping at that moment. Therefore, wouldn't you say it's more of a bug than influenced by latency?