TRICKS AND TIPS!!

Pro Players Don’t Need Glitches to Destroy You in Battlefield 4
By Ryan Rigney
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Next-generation military shooter Battlefield 4 is pretty busted. The game often crashes, there’s tons of lag, certain modes are inaccessible half the time and players have been complaining about getting unfairly fragged thanks to a one-hit-kill bug. But before you cry “glitch,” know that some of the coolest tricks used by the guys constantly slaughtering you aren’t exploits — just skillfully deployed maneuvers that are part of the game’s design.

Battlefield 4, which shipped October 29 (and was then available at the respective November launches of PlayStation 4 and Xbox One), is in the process of being patched by Electronic Arts. Even after it’s fixed, there’s a good chance that guys like Taylor Sollazo, 23, will keep owning you.

When I first encountered Sollazo, who goes by the handle of ScumbagWally, I was playing a multi-round set in Domination, an infantry-only mode focused on controlling territory around the game map. Thankfully, Sollazo was on my team. The dude was an absolute machine — every match we played, he’d come out with 25 or more kills and only a few deaths. We won every single game, and it was almost entirely because of him.

Impressed by his apparent skill, I opened up his profile to check out what weapon loadout he was using. What I found made no sense.

Sollazo was rocking one of the most basic assault rifle weapons, the SCAR-H, and he didn’t have any fancy attachments or perks on it. Although Battlefield gives you access to more powerful weapons as you level up, he was exclusively using equipment that was easily available to me, a low-rank player.

Some basic stats on Sollazo: His rank is 110, compared to me at level 9. He’s put 180 hours into Battlefield since it launched.

But this is the crazy part: His average kill-death ratio is 4.7. That means that for every 10 times Sollazo dies, he takes 47 people down with him.

This guy isn’t just good — he’s a death machine. In all my years of playing Battlefield games, I may have gone 30-and-1 only once or twice. Sollazo was doing it in every other game we played together.

The next time I died, I decided to wait a minute before spawning back in. Instead, I stayed on the menu and watched Sollazo play through his own viewpoint — a nifty feature new to Battlefield 4. From what I could tell, he just ran around the map at top speed at all times, throwing a few health-regenerating packs at his feet whenever he found a good cover spot and then taking out three or more enemies at a time from his carefully chosen location before moving on to the next one.

There was one other thing I noticed, although I didn’t understand the significance of it at the time. Every few seconds while moving around, Sollazo would suddenly hop. There didn’t seem to be any particular rhythm or logic to it — he’d just jump in the air every once in a while, although he did it more often when he was engaging enemies head-on.


Above: Taylor “ScumbagWally” Sollazo dominates a few enemy teams

I added Sollazo as a friend on Xbox Live, and sent him a message: “Hey, how the hell are you so good? Seriously, teach me your ways.”

A few minutes later, a reply appeared. “I eat my Wheaties,” it read.

“Dude. You have a 4.7. You’re on something a lot stronger than Wheaties.”

“Mountain Dew,” came the reply.

Obviously he wasn’t going to open up a dojo and teach me how to be a Battlefield master for nothing. So I asked if he would like to do an interview for WIRED, and he agreed. Sollazo explained via email some of the techniques he uses to dominate in Battlefield 4, and set me straight on the difference between “exploits” and legitimate tricks used by high-level players.

“Battlefield isn’t about raw talent or skill,” he says. “It’s about your awareness to events as they occur around you.”

Sollazo explains that his seemingly erratic jumping, called “bunny hopping,” is simply a habit built up over years of playing first person shooters ever since the first Halo. The reason is simple: It makes him harder to hit. (Bunny hopping is a contentious element of Battlefield 4, to say the least.)

A look at Sollazo’s Battlelog page shows that he favors using favors hip-firing accuracy. Almost every time he engages an enemy at close or long range, he begins by hip-firing while still sprinting, then pulls up his scope. The boosts to his hip-firing accuracy kick in the game’s auto-aim, pulling his iron sights towards the enemy automatically.

Sollazo also points out that what seems like a glitch is just baked into the game: You can revive your teammates with the defibrillator without actually touching them. As long as you’re standing on top of them, you can shock the air and your teammate will rise from the dead.

When I approached Sollazo to ask about the defibrillator trick, I referred to it as an “exploit,” and he was quick to correct me.

“Exploits are something that gives someone an unfair advantage over another player and was not meant to be implemented in the final release of the game,” Sollazo wrote. “The defib has a wide arc of [effect] that does not require you to aim directly at a teammate to get the revive animation. This has been a mechanic in place since the release of Battlefield 2 on the PC.”

A true exploit, he said, would be something more along the lines of “flare glitching,” a bug in Battlefield 4 that gave players an invulnerability to anti-air weapons while flying attack and scout helicopters.

Sollazo points out that the defibrillator should probably be patched, but not because it magically works in mid-air. Sometimes it doesn’t work even when you’re hovering directly over a teammate and pointing it right at them, he said, calling it “a faulty system and poorly tested mechanic.”

This is what happens when seriously smart players tear apart a game. They don’t play it “realistically,” because it’s better to examine it as a system, discover its flaws, and utilize them to maximum advantage.

Still, the question remains: Should Battlefield 4‘s developers address some of the tricks currently being used by top players? Or are they a legitimate part of the game that should be left in, for the sake of savvy players who like to take advantage of them?

On second thought, these hair-splitting questions can probably wait until Electronic Arts gets the game to run properly.

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Network Smoothing. What it is and how to use it.  Test your internet speed.  Then test your Network Smoothing and see what works for you.

As always... do your homework for best play!  I'm going to try a setting of 10 network smoothing to start with.



Network Speed Explained:  

On Battlelog:  

Battlefield 3 - Network Smoothing Factor & EXAMPLES

Suggestion..... along with the NETWORK SMOOTHING topic above... test your "PING" on your Internet Service Provider's network.  You want a PING below 100 if possible.

One thing that gives you game LAG or Latency...  that's the time when you push a button on your controller... and that signal has to travel from your PS4, over your ISP's network, to the EA Hosting BF4 Server and back to your PS4, to show you that you just shot an enemy on your TV.  Many factors can cause what you see and think is game LAG.

What is LAG?:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lag_%28online_gaming%29

What is PING?  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping_%28video_gaming%29

For video online gaming... it is suggested that your PING should be below 100.  A PING over 100 could cause LAG or game crashing. ALSO: USING A WIRED GAMING NETWORK IS IMPORTANT!! Using a wireless connection from your PS4 to your wireless router will introduce more LAG.

TEST your ISP's PING on your home Network:  http://www.pingtest.net/  -  Note, your PS4 can not use FLASH in it's PS4 Browser... so you can't test your PING from your PS4... use your home computer to test your network PING.

NOTE:  Your PING numbers will change depending on how far you are away from the game hosting server.  If you live in the Eastern U.S., and the EA BF4 Hosting Server is an U.S. Eastern Server... you PING will be the lowest.

However.... If you are in the Eastern U.S., and you are playing BF4 on a Hosting Server in the Western U.S., or a European Server in England... your PING number could be very high, causing you a lot of game LAG.

What is Latency?
Latency, or lag in this context, is a measure of the time delay experienced by a system. In gaming terms, it is the time between the user input and the picture change that is a result of this input. Latency is important because it can significantly affect the quality of the gaming experience, and consequently a user’s interest in ever playing that game again on a particular device — a chief concern for any game developer, game publisher, or service platform provider.

Gamepad Play via Console
Below are the typical steps involved in a console system communication sequence once a gamepad key is pressed:



It is important to note that everything after the GPU rendering (step 6) happens on a frame boundary, which equates to approximately 16.6 milliseconds at 60 fps. On a dedicated console with a highly optimized game, steps 3-6 can take anywhere from 50-80 milliseconds, and steps 7-10 take another 30-60 milliseconds, depending upon the TV.

This yields a total end-to-end latency of between 100 and 150 ms on the current generation consoles(PS3 & xBox360), which is just fast enough to make games feel smooth for the majority of gamers, yet certainly nowhere near their potential. A high-end gaming PC can easily reduce this latency by several frames.

The new Next-Gen Consoles like the PS4, is closer to a PC's settings for reducing latency.

The BF4 game is going through many patches and fixes.  The game needs to be further optimized for the PS4 and the Frostbite3 engine.  DICE is working as fast as they can to fix BF4.  EA must now also optimize their Game Server Farms to best run BF4 around the world.  It is assumed that EA now hosts this BF4 Server Farm.... but this is not confirmed yet.  SONY's Servers could also be the Hosting Servers.

Interesting Video and Product to help with LAG.  I have no idea if this works for the PS4.  Contact SEJENT for info about this LagBuster.  Could be total crap, so check it out.

I use the new Linksys High Speed wireless Router that has special settings for gaming... that does the same thing the LagBuster does... and a lot cheaper.  LINKSYS:  http://support.linksys.com/en-us/support/routers/ea6300


SEJENT:  http://www.sejent.com/


IGN LagBuster Review:  http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/08/10/lagbuster-review

Full user Lagbuster review YouTube:


THE OTHER SIDE:  LagBuster A Scam??

STRAIGHT PULL - Bugged or As Designed? - Battlefield 4