[PC]Startup animation skip | Forums

[invokeVoid]

Hello support! I'm here to report an issue, possibly a bug, that really ruins my experience in For Honor. So sometimes a certain character on the battlefield, usually an enemy, attacks way faster than a character of his type usually does - making defending yourself mostly impossible.
Some observations regarding this issue:
1) Usually happens in Breach. Sometimes in Dominion too, but much less often (I play both modes more or less equally as of late).
2) Character rarely starts attacking faster mid-match. They either do it from the get-go, or not at all. They will keep their timings faster for the entire game without slowing down.
3) Timing offset is not guaranteed to be both-sided. While one side can react to the fastest moves fine, sometimes the other player's attack is barely even visible.
I have recieved a similar complaint in my adress only once in the entire time - a person couldn't parry me at all and had hard time blocking just like I do against some other guys; on my screen that guy had completely fine animations, so were mine on my own screen.
4) When I ask my friends if they experience the same issue with the same opponent in the match, they almost always do. But sometimes they have less or more "funny looking" moves on their screen.
5) The issue started exhibiting itself a while ago, but more prominent appearanes happened first after the defensive actions update (grace period for defensive moves on defender's side), and even more so - after a Marching Fire update in the aforementioned gamemode.
6) Sometimes attacks get ridiculously fast; sometimes just a good bit faster, throwing off parry timings.
7) In the following matches, if the issue already was on a certain player, in the rematches it doesn't get better.

I have taken some footage about this issue in case it is not very clear what am I experiencing. The clip that shows the issue best is uploaded down below. Notice how Kensei moves - even before I lock onto him. On the contrary, notice that my framerate is fairly high and doesn't flactuate too much - and Shaolin (that is also attacking me) is moving at regular speed.

Video on Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/file/d/182k...ew?usp=sharing

[UbiGabrinth]

Could you ask other players who've seen the same issue to also report it? I'm perfectly willing to take this as a potential bug, but it's difficult with one report. I also noticed that there were clear animations for heavy attacks from the Kensei.

[invokeVoid]

Okay, I'll ask some of my friends to do so, but I was the only one who ever recorded it to my knowledge. When we'll be playing these days, I'll try to record some more of this issue if it happens and ask them to do so (not sure if they'll be able to though).

[invokeVoid]

Okay, I'll ask my friends to report it as well, but I was the only one who ever was trying to record it from us three. When we'll be playing these days, I'll try to record some more of this issue if it happens and ask them to do so (not sure if they'll be able to though).

[invokeVoid]

So we played quite a few games the past week and I couldn't get any footage that shows this issue well, but I have encountered some people moving extremely fast for a fight or two and then moving normally for the rest of the match, so I guess the note about the permanent behavior isn't so true.

But today our team has been... "Lucky" to get into a dominion match with a peculiar Shaolin (in the video - one with the monkey mask). I asked my friend to record if he seems strange to me, because on my screen he was doing some very sketchy attack speeds. This time I recorded a bunch of videos from this match, with the most exhibiting one, again, posted below this message.

After the match I decided to check on the ms timings of the attacks in the video, and it looks like every attack he did was about to 200 ms faster than the usual counterpart (I took the base timings from YouTube video made by "freeze" on Shaolin framechecks. I could post it here but it should be easy to find on youtube). I counted amount of time in between frames when the attack indicator showed up on my screen and the frame when I lost health.

For example:
Heavy Attack
First frame when attack indicator showed up: dating 13:159
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cqU...ew?usp=sharing
Frame when I got damaged by an attack: dating 13:795
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_KX...ew?usp=sharing
--Normally Shaolin top heavy would be 800 ms, this one was ~600 ms to make 200ms of difference.
Light Attack
First frame when the attack indicator was up: 9.196
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1O9r...ew?usp=sharing
Frame when I got HP damage: 9:464
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tOM...ew?usp=sharing
--According to framecheck by Freeze, Shaolin's side light should be 500 ms, this one was roughly 250-300 ms (making again an average of 250 ms difference).

Other players didn't seem to skip as much of their animation for me. Here's the footage of the fight with aforementioned timestamps:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eHa...ew?usp=sharing

With my friend we also did same check but with his footage, and on his screen the same Shaolin was also having a fairly stable startup animation skip on every attack, but the he had about to 100 ms skips instead of 200ms on my screen. He should soon reply to this thread as well.

[The_Chael]

Hello, I'm a friend of The_Manservant. As requested I have also tried to record instances of this issue and this is the result:
In this match there were 3 Shaolin players and one of them (Reiatsuken, the one with the monkey mask) seems to have around 100ms less on every attack than normal. It's a bit difficult to make out by just watching the video, but it becomes clear by checking the frames and having the ms of the attacks displayed.
It is also noticeable that the other 2 Shaolin players seem to have the normal speed on their attacks, unlike the 3rd one.
During this match I wasn't the only one who had this issue with him, everyone on my team had this experience.
His ping also was normal and shouldn't have anything to do with this issue.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AGj...ew?usp=sharing

[invokeVoid]

Today we played some more (with four of us being a premade team) and got another game with a good few people who were skipping frames (one match we had three people skipping animation for all of us). Another example that I managed to record:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TFJ...ew?usp=sharing

[UbiGabrinth]

Those attacks do seem remarkably fast. There is the issue of latency that could cause some of this effect. I'll reach out to the team to report this issue and see if it can be reproduced. Do you have any idea what could cause this to occur?

[invokeVoid]

In the last video that I recorded I briefly pressed Tab (to see the scoreboard and thus the latency shown on it). In other cases latency also seemed fine, but I didn't monitor it mid-fight all the time (for example when Chael fights someone who has frameskips on his and mine screens). Since we with Chael had different amount of ms skipped during attacks of the same opponent, maybe issue lies in the connection in between specific players? Is absolutely all network connections nowadays are managed by dedicated servers, or some packets are still P2P? Or maybe a certain player somehow gets worse connection to the server and thus server can't communicate with other players in time to show the entire attack? Maybe somehow their attacks are treated as defensive actions and thus they are not synced with the enemies on their screens?

Sadly, I have no idea myself.