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http://lmgtfy.com/?q=hitscan

Have someone stand about 50-60m out and fire around your head. You can see the rounds coming at you and zip by your head. They aren't moving that fast. At 2500 m/s you would only see tracers.

This is especially noticeable with the assault rifle.

I am not. Damage calculation is most definitely done by hitscan.

What I'm saying is that there is a disconnect between in game mechanics and the lore. The lore states that bullets are traveling out of our rifles at thousands of m/s. If that were true, you wouldnt need anything but hitscan for most any of the weapons in the game as the time between firing and damage application at ranges sub-100 meters would be on the order of the network latency between our computer/PS3 and the server (0-40ms for 0-100m). With a system like that, ballistics are mostly pointless, and I would argue the forge gun and both large and small rail turrets should also be hit scan.

However, the in game mechanics show that bullets are actually traveling much much slower than 2500 m/s. I don't know how you could actually measure bullet velocity with any degree of accuracy but I suspect its around 250 m/s or so that bullets actually travel. At that point its 400 ms between round fired and round hit at 100m, which is large enough that I believe ballistics would matter... like they matter for the forge gun and rail turrets.

So what i'm really trying to say here is either:

1: Fix the game mechanics and make those projectiles fire so fast that you could not see a reason to remove hitscan.

2: Fix the lore, remove the fact that these weapon fire rounds that travel as thousands of m/s (cause they dont in game) and then consider removing hitscan like they already have for the forge gun and rail turrets.

Either way, its not the presence of hit scan that matters imo, its the lore/mechanic disconnect. The game feels like it shouldn't have hitscan because the rounds aren't traveling all that fast to begin with. So either remove hitscan or make the game actually feel like it should have it.

I don't think that's very likely, actually.
With a strafing target the problem is generally much more tied to the reaction time. Nobody can track a target perfectly, and so while some of the fight comes down to tracking ability a fair bit of it is down to luck. The difference non-hitscan weapons would make at the ranges in a strafe fight would be irrelevant. You're looking at a couple of milliseconds, if that. That's a fraction of the human reaction time - it's going to make no difference.

If you wanted ballistics to matter and for that to be noticeable in a strafe fight you'd have to cut the speed by a huge amount, to the point where fighting at range would become practically impossible.

If you want an example of this, look at planetside 2. That has weapon ballistics. In a strafe fight, does it -really- make much of a difference? At range it most certainly does, but these weapons don't operate at nearly those ranges.

I don't really see engagement ranges in Legion becoming drastically longer - and they'd have to, if they were to warrant ballistics for most weapons. At its core I don't think the game will be drastically different. I mean, look at the demo - it's all the same base. There's not much justification to change the engagement ranges so hugely.

I would like to see it a little more, though, on weapons where it makes sense. It actually does make sense on sniper rifles - having ballistics allows it to be a more interesting affair than direct point and click from a distance and rewards skill shots. It also paves the way for sniper rifles to actually be powerful (but require some ability) rather than redline hiding snorefest tools. As I recall there was an 'Experimental sniper rifle' in closed beta which functioned a bit like this.

Again, though - is it really a crutch if it makes very little practical difference? You're really not going to see the difference from having a non-hitscan weapon except in a handful of cases.



The chances of a piece of an exploding LAV actually intercepting a projectile are minimal.
Let's go with this hypothetical situation, though.

We can assume that an exploding LAV will throw out a certain amount of shrapnel and debris (assuming we have a destruction and physics system for LAVs like this, which is unlikely). As the distance from the LAV increases, the amount of shrapnel in the area decreases, and the chances of the debris intercepting a shot drops pretty much exponentially.

So, we have to be very close to the exploding LAV. When you're so close, the travel time of a projectile is going to be minimal.
To the point where if the debris would intercept the projectile even if it were hitscan instead of travel time based.

This is obviously an edge case. Even if by some minor miracle CCP managed a physics and destruction engine for LAVs sophisticated enough to have shrapnel with hitboxes, the chances of this scenario occurring are tiny.

So for most weapons, what benefits does a non-hitscan weapon system bring? Why would Legion be better off for it?

The "superior FPS killz" part of you might think that hit scan is for "scrubs" and stuff, but there's no point to put physics where it's not needed.

I say keep non hit scan to the minimum, to keep server load down to allow for larger battles.

Well you said hit scan is a crutch.
So...

Anyway, it would actually not be immersive, since I know the velocities are so huge for anything other than a few weapons that if I can even feel a hint of bullet drop, then it's immersion breaking.

Plasma Rifles, Rail Rifles, Scrambler Rifles all use technologies that have projectiles moving at absurdly fast speeds. (Or in the case of the scrambler rifle, energy in the form of light and heat)