Guild Wars 2

Josh, I’m going to make a clear statement here:

There will be lag. Not all players play in perfect conditions, the server is not perfect. There will always be somebody affected by it.

You can’t just throw your hands up in the air and say you can’t do anything about it. Design the zones and traps so it’s not an issue. Whether this means coding them to be less lag sensitive, or simply not making anything that would be in the first place, is up to you.

For example, take the rapids:

If you so much as touch them, you get knocked back. Effects applied by the server such as knockback override what the client is seeing.
If the client’s connection is unstable, the server does not see continuous movement. It sees the character fall and touch the rapids. This is normally corrected by the client automatically as the server catches up with it, but because the knockback overrides what the client sees, it will happen regardless of what the player’s seeing in the game client.

So that’s probably the root cause of why so many players are having issues with the rapids. Now, what you can do about it:

1) Make the server entirely trust the client for location and trigger the knockback client-side. Of course, this enables hacking, and it’d need a lot of work to work into the game.

2) Have a half second grace period, and only trigger the knockback when the player is not on a designated safe spot after that. This accounts for the generally longest latency periods you’re going to see, by giving the client half a second leeway to catch up while not being long enough that players will reliably be able to abuse it to escape the rapids again. In the majority of cases, this should be enough to get rid of the issue where a player is safe but gets knocked back anyways.

3) Same as before, but just teleport the player onto designated locations based on where they are in the rapids (have them wash up on a rock, or something)

This logic needs to be applied to other things as well, the rapids are just a glaring example. Lag does not make the game fun.