Yes, Syncerror once publicly stated that Quake Champions has the best netcode out of any game right now, because, and i shit you not, he saw some youtuber's video saying so.
Yes, in the March 2018 patch they fucked it over completely and let all sanity go in order to turn QC into the largest desynchronized lagfest in the history of quake.
It's quite sad that not just QC but a bunch of game devs these days are very incompetent as a whole, games are normally unfinished and/or buggy on day of release and one/a couple of modders can fix the issues that paid game devs can never do.
After the disappointment that RE3 was I'm never ever going to pre-order a video game again no matter what Dev team has it, even Nintendo will not get my money until I've seen enough reviews to convince me otherwise.
I may have changed some config setting in QC. Or this is also netcode related. But something is wrong.
Getting attacked by LG, rail, RL is fine, I hear the pain sound and see health/armor go down.
But in some situations against MG/HMG/nailgun, fully tanked 100/100 or more, I see an enemy, I engage, don't hear any of my pain sounds don't see my health go down so I stay confident and engaged. 2-3 seconds pass and suddenly I drop dead out of nowhere.
At first I thought I may have been railed by other enemies or something, but there are no pain sounds, no -90 dmg, no pushback, nothing. The killcam does not show any other player nearby, it's only that one mg/nail...
My internet is 100 mbit stable 20 ping or so.
I wonder what's happening in those situations.
Maybe lots of dropped sounds? Upload lag on the end of others?
Apparently when there are multiple sounds generated at the same times, some gets covered/deleted.
It's like the sound engine gets overwhelmed or who the fuck knows.
Even in the last tournament and in the lead to it the pros were getting mad at the lack of crucial sounds- we aren't even talking footsteps, we're talking fully silent rockets flying behind the corner, you peek and eat a ghost rocket in the face out of nowhere.
While in quake 3 you could always dodge rockets around the corner just by listening.
Fixing the sound system (which is probably impossible due to spaghetti code) would be a massive nerf to anarki and sorlag. A big part of their effectiveness is due to missing sounds while they're flying at 900 ups toward you, so a moment you're picking up an item and watching a door you expect they to come from, the next instant you have a retarded lizard humping your back and covering you in slime, and you didn't hear it coming at all from the other direction.
Well the poster above you also mentions not even getting any knockback from rail etc so I think these are more than missed sounds. More like events that dont even get sent to the client (or delayed events) such as being railed but never seeing or hearing it.
That aside the sound issue with multiple sounds is a thing, even in QL
When I started playing QL I had a SoundBlaster Audigy in my box and I heard everything. As time passed the later versions of windows did not support the Audigy so I moved to using onboard sound. That was the point I for the first time started experiencing missed sounds in QL. Things like taking megahealth and not getting any sound from it and so on.
I think it simply has to do with the amount of channels your sound card has, Audigy had like 32 channels most onboard only have like 16 channels so I think these missing sounds are a result of lack of channels.
In my experience, the netcode is okay (not great, not terrible) when everyone has 60ms ping or less. When my ping is higher and playing against higher ping, things get really fucky. Playing against a >100ms ping player feels unpredictable.
EDIT: It doesn't help that the game has such high variability in player speeds/sizes. If these things were more narrowly defined across all players, it would make optimizing the netcode easier.