Dear HTC,
I have played this game since beta. I played Warbirds before that. Fighter Duel on KALI before that. So I have a bit of experience.
Please don't brush this off as just another whiner complaining, but some honest usefull feedback.
For the last 2 years or so, lag and warpiness has increased. The threshold seems to be about 500 or more people in the server and it starts to fall apart. This is not just my observation but essentially everyone in game. In large furballs it quite frustrating to have bandits over 2k away simply changing direction at random and closer bandits still "blip" from point to point.
I repeat, this is not me or my connect. It is observed by everyone in my squad which also consists largely of old-timers. It is also observed by everyone in a large furball, I'll ask on range vox when it seems to be getting out of hand and get a unanimous from all present agreement that is warpy as heck.
It also manifests in things such as delayed kill and text messages, sometimes 5-10 seconds! Getting shot several seconds after a merge or when you can clearly see the enemy plane shooting or pointing way off target and hitting you anyways.
I know that managing 500+ players connections from all over the world is not easy. And during non-peak hours you system works great. I think your netcode and updating algorithm work well.
May I suggest simply throwing more horsepower and bandwidth at it? If that is simply not an option I can only suggest limiting the arena size to about 400 and starting multiple arenas. Perhaps you could have multiple servers world-wide with prioritized connections to the main server?
I think that this is seomthing you folks are really going to have to fix if you ever want to get more folks playing. i.e. currently the more playing, the worse the gameplay, meaning less new players. I doubt you will ever see 1000+ players in the current MA simply because the gameplay will be awfull.
Thanks for listening,
g00b
P.S. I have plenty of video showing people flying backwards, sideways, teleporting, etc... I'd be happy to provide these as well as pings and/or tracerts if that would help.