Dear ARMA Lovers,

we all know this problem for ages: When playing a singleplayer round you get like 90 FPS or even more. But when joining a multiplayer one you end up with 30 FPS or less. You can't believe it's your system which sucks, since you play other state-of-the-art games with ultra settings and end up with 100 FPS or more. It's actually very hard to react in-time when the game lags as hell. On top of that, most multiplayer games are glitchy. You can run through walls, fall trough a floor and die. Sometimes you can see enemies or vehicles warping around. And it's probably better to disable your sound because of the voice stuttering. Oh, and sometimes a door won't open or you can't just climb a ladder. And it's impossible to hit that guy running upstairs because he is teleporting upwards on every stair.

So what do we do? We ask mister Google of how to fix our FPS. Correct in-game settings, start-up parameters, exotic memory allocators or config tweaks. The result is the same. Still 30 FPS while in a multiplayer game. And we're frustrated.

For me, I found myself asking: Is this game really better than previous versions? Well, ARMA 3 looks fancy now, but it still suffers from old.. and by that I mean very old problems. When it comes to multiplayer, the answer is no. The netcode is still problematic.

So much for the intro :)

I think THE main problem in ARMAs netcode - and I know it since Operation Flashpoint - is that the client is somehow synching tick times with the server, limiting the clients main loop to that tick rate. Maybe someone said that this is needed to handle inter- and extrapolation correctly. But in the current implementation it looks like the game logic and netcode stuff is done right before the rendering, delaying the rendering procedure. I even fear there is a "wait" implementation if some networks packets are outstanding.

From a publishers point of view it's the worst case happening: The player isn't satisfied. Even worse: The player is frustrated. So they will spread the word on how bad the last multiplayer match felt. And this is bad for the brand ARMA.

Please, please focus on that with highest priority possible as this affects every player out there! Change the way your entities are synchronized. Face the warping, teleporting and glitching by avoiding extrapolation. And most important:

Server FPS must not affect client FPS.

Thank you so much!