This might not work for all kinds of combat systems... and I'm obviously talking about PvP btw.
Either this idea is completely retarded or it's genius, I'm not sure because I'm not a developer, and never made a game before.

But in many games the player who has lower ping has a big advantage.
I know WoW did something to even the ping issues out.. I'm not completely sure what it was but I downloaded an addon once that removed whatever WoW did to stop lower pings from playing as if they had higher ping.

What this addon did was make a line at a point in the casting bar.. Once I reached that point Icould cancel the spell casting and it would still fire the spell... so I basically had 30% faster casting speed than most players.

What I'm suggesting is that.. for example.. If you have a melee attack... and a parry move... When someone hits you with the melee attack..
He will begin an animation.. And you have 0.3 sec or 0.5 sec.. somewhere along those numbers at least to use your parry move.

So my suggestion is that you add in the delay that ping will cause.. and you will have to chose a ping number that will be the average that most players on your server will or should have. So if you want NA and EU players on same server.. You should probably choose 100 or 150 ping as the average. and if it's just NA or EU then around 50 should be enough..

Then when someone starts the animation... after 0.3 sec you were supposed to get hit.. But with the idea I've got.. you add some more duration so it counts for the average ping.

So I've just brought the idea to the table and gotten this thread started.
It's atm just a rough idea that needs work.
Hopefully someone who is better at networking can add on to this idea like for example just what I've heard is that 100 ping = 1 sec delay.
And what to do if a player has lower ping than the average... because then he still gets an advantage.. because he gets more than 0.3 sec to react while people at the average ping gets 0.3 sec and people above the average ping gets slightly less than 0.3 sec.

i know some games use a ping "buffer" which makes everyone ping the same as the highest, unless the highest is like 400... but i like your idea, i guess it would fair things... if you can go for it, if i knew how id do it or tell you how

What this addon did was make a line at a point in the casting bar.. Once I reached that point Icould cancel the spell casting and it would still fire the spell... so I basically had 30% faster casting speed than most players.

No, you just counter the lag. That's you would be as fast as a player with 0 ms lag.

Lag, or ping, just results in a delay of events, either control events or visual events. A common way to make your more 'lag' resistent is to avoid instant actions and only have delayed actions. Casting a spell is a delayed action, but firing a bullet in a FPS game which will hit the target in 300ms is a delay too. Therefore lag isn't really an issue in games like WoW where you have very long casting times, thought you, as player, can benefit from visual 'hacks', but the right timing would do the job too.

A pitfall of delayed actions is cheating, because the client already know when he will be shoot in the future and can therefore counter this by moving quickly away.

[quote name='glhf' timestamp='1333998257' post='4929637']
What this addon did was make a line at a point in the casting bar.. Once I reached that point Icould cancel the spell casting and it would still fire the spell... so I basically had 30% faster casting speed than most players.

Therefore lag isn't really an issue in games like WoW where you have very long casting times
[/quote]

There is a big advantage like I said in the OP.
I had 30% faster casting times than everyone else which makes a huge difference.
This makes a even bigger difference if a instrantly start casting a new spel after I casted the first one.. means I casted the first spell 30% faster than others and I also got to start on the second spel 30% faster than others.