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Overwatch Double Animations & Shot Delay

TheVeiledFlame
Just Moved In

Hello everyone, I'm a semi-pro Overwatch player that had to quit pursuing competitive gaming because of one particular issue that I haven't been able to figure out for years. More or less what goes on is I get double animations and shot delay when playing Overwatch. I can't confirm this problem doesn't affect other games as net code is always different for each game. However a similar issue did pop up in Apex Legends when I played that as well. This issue in particular has stumped Shaw & Blizzard so far so I'm coming to you guys to see if you have any insight on the issue.

 

So what happens is when playing overwatch there are random delays when shooting with any character in the game or when using an ability. But the main character that visibly shows problems is Genji, his right click animation plays more than once if I try to flick shot most commonly. Originally I was with Shaw, but ended up buying a Telus 50 DSL connection as well and was disappointed when both connections had identical symptoms. Oddly enough both connections when testing with WinMTR come out totally clean and stable and show no real indication of anything out of the ordinary. I've tested 3 different desktop PCs in my house, went downtown to an Internet cafe with Telus Fibre, and brought my setup to my brother's house across the province (Alberta) and every scenario had the same problem. 

 

The double animations are irritating but the delay between shots is the main issue for me. The thing that baffles me is it seems to affect both Overwatch and Apex Legends but no issues show up in my WinMTRs. I'll post a WinMTR for Telus this evening, but trust me no issues show up on it (I've spent hours running WinMTRs to find a problem) so its doubtful it has anything to do with my connection; Shaw has identical results.

 

 

 

The issue

 

Look at these times in the video

0:40 is the first double animation
0:50 is the second/third example of a double animation
3:30 is another example

 

 

I had contacted blizzard in every way I could to get them to investigate, they more or less told me they managed to replicate the problem but the steps taken to reproduce it were sporadic. So that trail went cold:

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/overwatch/t/alberta-canada-double-animations-delayed-shots-in-game...

 

 

I'm at my wits end at this point since I'm a streamer and competitive player that can do neither as a result of this issue. After all this investigating all I can conclude is this issue is specific to Alberta but I have no way to find out why that would be. I'm hopeful Pure fibre will help the issue but I have no way of knowing until it finally makes it my house; the time estimates Telus employees keep giving me for that are always completely random. If you guys have any ideas let me know.

1 REPLY 1

fix_ow_peering
Just Moved In

The hand-off between Telus and Equinix suffers from severe latency spikes, with potential further latency added from following hops in the Equinix network.

I've been stuck with this problem for over 3 years. This is still an issue but it's always been worse than you describe. Enemy player movement is completely degraded, visibly faster than it should be, extremely unpredictable and correction is likely being attempted client-side. Hit registration is delayed or doesn't register at all. Both together make it nearly impossible to play properly.

There are only two solutions: One is to play on servers outside of NA. Where it's a struggle to kill anything on NA servers, the game feels like slow motion on Asia or EU servers and is incredibly smooth - albeit delayed. A VPN is now required to play on servers outside of NA due to the removal of region selection and forced crossplay.

The only solution for playing on NA is to roll the VPN lottery until you find one with with low latency & that doesn't suffer from a poor connection at the hand-off to Equinix peering nodes.

This affects all players from BC and Alberta, and unless you've played on another region you've likely never played Overwatch as it was meant to be played.

Telus told me for them to seek out a resolution or look into changing the routing paths I would have to post on the forum and collect other players with the same issue as they wouldn't look into fixing this for a single customer as it may affect others. Unfortunately I imagine most other players aren't interested enough in the game to understand there's a serious issue with connections from our area.

Do you still play?