ST-CS-10-339-75
March 2002

2.  Deflection and Aiming  (S)

When a player accurately tracks and fires upon a target which has a high rate of movement in relation to the player (e.g. moving left to right in front of the player, or circling the player) it is not possible to achieve hits by firing directly at the target.

A Counter-Strike cheat was employed to obtain exact tracking. The aimbot built into the cheat was set to lock onto the target's stomach and fire automatically. It can be seen in the footage that the crosshair is indeed exactly on target for the duration of the capture.

Hits only occur once the target is sufficiently far away that deflection is reduced to an extent whereby the inaccuracy present in aiming is insufficient to permit misses.

Note that the aimbot snaps the players view instantly to the target once the target becomes visible.

This problem is generally recognized by experienced players who have encountered it many, many times. Indeed, part of being a skilled player of Counter-Strike is knowing when a situation will lead to a high deflection shot being necessary and avoiding those situations since it is difficult to achieve hits.

The cause of this behaviour is not clear. One suggestion has been that the client side position interpolation between updates from the server may not be compensated for. As such, players would always be slightly in front of their position as shown on screen. However, the author discounts this as the update rate is at least twenty times a second; in 0.05 seconds the distance travelled is insufficient for the hitboxes to move enough to permit a bullet aimed at the center of a player (as shown in the video) to miss.

The author favours the idea that the cause of the problem must lie in the way the server corrects for latency, the player position history not adequately or correctly performing its function.