Scientists have recently discovered this anomaly known as "lag". Here are the results of their findings:

Stu,

You are experiencing lag as Luna so cleverly pointed out. Let me try to explain in the simple way I understand it. Luna's pic will help. But remember in this game, we are talking about thousands of users and a hundred different countries.

Lag can originate from many sources. It could be caused by 1) You having a poor Internet connection. 2) One or more other players having a poor connection 3) The server being overloaded with too many players 4) Any other number of reasons.

When you are flying a signal is sent to the server and returned to you. These signals tell you and the server where you are in the game map and that's how you see the terrain in the map flowing passed you. So, now you and the server know where you are. There are up to 7 others in the same game with you and the server is doing the same for them. However, it is also sending you and the other players a signal to tell each of you where you are. This is how you see friendliest and enemies on your screen and radar. Now, each of you are firing hundreds of bullets, tank shells and bombs. The server is tracking each one of those and sending their locations to each of you. The server registers that your bullets are occupying the same space as some unfortunate red and sends you a signal to tell you the "Wumper hit Xyz", Wumper hit xyz's wing" and sends a signal to Xyz that he has bullet holes in his windshield and He's was taken down by Wumper. All the while tracking the other six players and their bullets, bombs and shells. Amazing, if you ask me, but I was amazed the first time I saw Pong.

So now let's assume you are wherever you are USA and Xyz in in Australia. Those instantaneous signals have to travel from you to the server (Spain?) to Australia and back again(and six more locations equally diverse). So if everything in the world is perfect, you shoot Xyz the signal zooms to Spain the. Australia then Spain then back to you to show you a successful hit on your screen. If everything isn't quite perfect that signal could skip or bounce anywhere in between. So, you're getting a message that you hit Xyz, but Xyz may not have even seen you yet. He's 7 seconds behind your real time. You light him up. You get confirmation, but he has t seen it yet. The. Suddenly you pop up on his screen and he lights you up. Any of those skips and bounce can confuse the sequence of events and even though from your point of view you shot him 7 seconds ago he's sure he just killed you. While all of this is happening, your location or his in the map has gets bounced around. While the server is trying to catch up with each planes location it updates. So when you see a plane going from point a to d without passin through b or c it's the server trying to catch up.

If you think about all of the things the server has to track, instantly, it's amazing any of it works. When there are too many people trying to get on the server it bogs it down and we get lag and connection errors. When you or another player has less than an optimal signal, we get lag and connection errors. The very term lag indicates something falling (lagging) behind. Its your device and those of others and the server all trying to communicate in real time. If there's a hiccup anywhere in the mix you're going to see weird stuff. Take some comfort in knowing we all see it. We all suffer the same as you. It's frustrating, but I really believe Zuperman and the rest of the team are trying their best to keep it running as smoothly as possible.

Nobody's cheating. Nobody has access to different planes than you. It's jus lag.

Hey the same thing happens to me, I will fire at someone and keep firing and then i get shot down. On my ipad i reboot it by holding down the big button on the right side and the button top left right, both at the same time until it shuts off. Someone on dogfight recommended it, it may be just my imagination but i swear it works. I reboot every day now. Sometimes I do it twice lol lol.

Also I had comcast upgrade my internet. It is much better.

One thing to add to Parrot's explanation. (We just call him Parrot, or The Bird, and in the game, he is sometimes the Puff of Feathers. Pretend you are back in college, and nobody uses real names, because everyone has a nickname that must be used instead. Yo Spanky. Wazzup Puckerbutt.)

Zup seems to have some sort of data bridging logic so that the local app does certain things if the server intermittently stops passing or receiving data due to a player's lag. Let's say my signal sucks. I am chasing Parrot, but because my signal is sketchy, I am not getting a nice real-time stream of data from the server that tells my phone where Parrot is. As the data reception pauses, sometimes the app simply has Parrot disappear from view, but OTHER TIMES, it keeps him flying straight and level from his last position.

I can tell when it does this (and it is a big clue as to my lagging) when I see Parrot in a hard bank, but then his plane suddenly stops turning, and instead it flies straight at a constant heading, altitude, and speed, even though a second ago he pulling a high-g turn. In fact, he's still banked at 80 degrees, but he's somehow flying straight toward the horizon! When that happens, I KNOW that in another second he will finish that high-g turn at phenomenal velocity, faster than any plane I've ever seen. Sure enough, when my phone finally is able to receive the server data, poof, he's gone. In fact, poof, he's behind me and, poof, I'm dead!

Of course if I had fired at him when my app paused his movement and temporarily suspended him in a straight course ahead of me, my app would have registered hitting him. If I am making the right assumptions about the local apps and servers' interactions, the hit logic is local to me, and I'll see multiple strikes on him. He's not actually there, but as the data catches up, he might very well die, even though he now thinks that he is behind me and shooting me up. I've seen it a lot during MCLE (Massively Catastrophic Lag Events) (lol) where two players pass each other, think they've shot each other, although neither thinks they got shot, and then both die a few moments later.

The other day, the lag was so bad, I got shot up and died, and then when I respawned, I took off, and as I rose over the runway, I got killed. There wasn't a red in sight! I believe you've reported this one Stuart. I got killed from before I got killed! Like, it stored it up and spit it back out after rebirth. Oh the Humanity! I was really mad.

It's annoying, and I tend to stop playing when I see Big Lag. Kind of like trying to listen to i-Tunes while driving in an area with bad data coverage. Except that i-Tunes doesn't have to re-catch-up to real-time play -- it can recover and be a few seconds behind from before, no big deal. Multiplayer games have to catch back up, and so you get pauses, skips, AND jumps.

Manfred

I was in a game the other day and several guys were telling another that he was lagging bad. I do this I don't know what I expect the guy to do... Leave? That doesn't seem fair to him, but following a guy and dumping 300 rounds in him while he's still bombing your hangars doesn't seem fair either.

Anyway, this guy says," what do u mean I am lagging?" Immediately followed in rapid succession a game status something like this...

Player 1 crashed
Player 1 brought down by Player 2
Player 1 destroyed by Player 3
Player 1 brought down by Player 4
Player 1 crashed

I said, "that answer your question?"

There seem to be some odd phenomena to do with this sometimes. This evening, I and another Blue were shooting at a red who was approaching straight and level. We had him in a typical machine gun scissor and there could only be one end. As his aircraft descended in flames, a message appeared 'Wtf? There was noone near me!' and he left before we could explain that two of us had been pouring gunfire into him from short range. I honestly believe he didn't know we were there.

Mind you, the other day I took off in the middle of a game, completely alone... At which point my kite bursts into flame, a second before an orange spot appears right behind me.

Cursed lag.