Should this flag count?

[Roflcopter]

Can the server detect when the person is lagging? i.e if it receives no packets for X amount of time?

If so it should simply:
- Store the players last known position before the lag
- Wait until the player is steadily sending packets again
- Restore the players position before they were lagging

It might cause a bit of jumpiness on the laggers side, but they should not be able to simply lag in and out of the oppositions base.

Also it would be really nice if we differentiated between high ping and lagging. 99% of european idiots believe having ping > 100 is lagging because we do not live next to their servers, even though you can still maintain a steady PJ and play fairly.

I don't think the server has to have knowledge of when a player is lagging to stop players when they are. It can simply be fixed client side by disallowing players that haven't communicated with the server in 0.5 seconds firing or walking.

High ping players are lagging just by definition (their high ping literally means they are lagging behind the current state of the game). But all these terms are used roughly. High ping players are also not entirely fair because they enable tactics like keeping them on defense where they tend to be more successful (that is, because they are high ping both players will tend to take more damage in an encounter so there is a higher chance their opponent will be killed even if they die too).

In fact, for that reason alone it's possible to get a slight 1-2 bullet advantage when you need it most. And there is no fix for it that would otherwise give high-pinged players an even footing. If the game were to disallow dead players from registering further damage laggers would suddenly perform very poorly, the alternative is that a well-coordinated team can take more benefits than weaknesses from lag.

Just to clarify there are four main decisions that can be changed:

• Hit registration fixes -- already in SVN
  
• Disabling further movement when lagged out -- most people seem to think it's a good idea and I can't see any real negatives
  
• Disabling ghost mode; instead just allow players to kill players that are lagging out -- again I don't see why the game should promise anything to players that are lagging out
  
• Disallowing dead players from shooting -- would likely be too unfair on high-ping players