Issues, Workarounds & Localization

i fight a lot in fw complexes.
often when some ship comes in, and i start to target it, my lock cycle will start, then fail at the end of the cycle.
this is not because the targets 5s invul timer after warping in, if the target is invul, i cant even start locking it.
its some wierd bug, and it hurts so much because of the fact that the cycle has to run though fully to fail, and that at first it appears as if i would lock the target. so i will lose some more time after the cycle fails while i have to realize the game screws me.

i lost count how many fights i lost because of this. its annoying as hell, and totally unfun.
so, is this a known bug? is there a workaround? and when will it get fixed?

Not just you.

You're dealing with an animations and server confirmations. Animations start client-side, but if the server doesn't confirm a follow-on state, the animation seemingly drops. You initiate the locking animation, the server initiates the locked target animation.

So the animation fails at the end, but the action was dead from the start.

The only thing I experience similar to this are missile volleys. Very commonly my initial salvo of missiles will play the missile trail animation and explode on target without a damage notification. My ammo will still de-increment by 1.

I suspect auto-repeat is client-side, and for some reason the initial activation doesn't register with the server consistently.

Interesting note: For lock animation duration to be accurate, the client needs to know your signature resolution and the target's signature radius. And the timing is accurate, so I assume the client has that information.

if it was true what you say, my lock animation should stop after one server tick. this then would delay my ability to target by 3s max
(start lock 1s max + 1 tick server comunicates back it fails + 1 tick new lock start ) witch already was bad enough to decide frigate 1v1 in many cases.
what i see however, is that the target lock fails much later, only after my full targeting cycle finishes.

in any case, i am not so much interested in the reason for this problem (at least not within this context). it doesnt realy matter.
WHAT matters is that it leads to bad and inconsistent gameplay. im very interested in a fix or at least a comment of the devs if they are aware of this and if they plan to adress this issue.

I get this issue occasionally when running missions, my solution is to simply hold CTRL and spam left-click for the first few seconds of the target animation after a ship lands/spawns.

Bad ticks are commonplace... just like that super warping out of your bubble because hamsters.

This should be moved to Issues, Workarounds and Localization. ISD?

Yeah, this is also why sometimes you get a seemingly much faster lock on a frig rat in a battleship, cannot tell you how many times I've had a 2 second lock time on some random elite frig rat due to a client/server desync. It happens.

Personally I experience this effect a lot more often in the last couple of weeks. I suspect BIAB has changed something here. Before this change it was a very rare issue. Never had it before in solo fights, but can recall 2 times in the last week. It happens more often under lag/TiDi situation.