What is the current tic rate/timestep for Firefall?
Firefall servers don't quite use traditional ticks. Most things are updated every 50 ms (or 20 times per second). However, in terms of latency, the gameserver's responsiveness is roughly equivalent to traditonal ticks every 10 ms (or 100 per second).
Can tic rate/timestep density be increased? If not universally, can it be increased for PvP matches? Or stricter still, for organized tourney matches? (I'm hoping this would help resolve the "hit by a plasma cannon before I even saw the shot leave his barrel" effect)
This could probably be done for PvP, though this seems like something likely to introduce new bugs or other unforseen consequences. This would slightly reduce players' latency/interpolation windows.
We've actually made some changes recently to help address the "hit before I saw the shot" issue. Basically, the interpolation delay was being applied to all remote players' weapons fire. This creates a visually smooth, consistent experience, but at the cost of delaying some information. From an esports perspective, that delayed information could have been important, so we've removed interpolation delays from various places where it doesn't necessarily belong.
After these changes are patched out, you'll see other players' attacks delayed pretty much only by socket travel time. This is the theoretical minimum delay possible, so I don't expect it to get any better than that. If I run two clients in the office, and disable the latency simulator, then the time of an attack on one client is indistiguishable from the time of attack on the other (with super low latency on the office LAN, the second client receives the first client's attack message on the very next frame). Unfortunately these changes aren't appropriate for a small bugfixing patch, so this might not reach you all until the next big content branch.
Where does ping advantage generally lie in practice for FF's lag comp model? High side, low side, generally balanced? (stuff like peeker's advantage)
There is a peeker's advantage in Firefall, just as in other games with interpolation. Also like other games, it's basically always better to have a lower latency. Let's consider a contrived example, where player A has 50 ms one-way latency, and player B has 1000 ms. Let's say that an additional 100 ms is added for smooth interpolation, and both players' reaction times are instantaneous. Also, it takes two shots to kill a player, and their weapons fire twice each second (500 ms cooldown).
If player A pops out from behind a corner and shoots player B:
-0 ms, player A moves out; sees and shoots player B
-50 ms, server receives input, shoots player B
-500 ms, player A fires second shot at player B
-550 ms, server receives input, shoots and kills player B
-1050 ms, player B receives input for player A's first attack
-1150 ms, player B displays player A's interpolated movement
-1550 ms, player B receives input for second attack, and death
If player B pops out from a corner and shoots player A:
-0 ms, player B moves out; sees and shoots player A
-500 ms, player B fires second shot at player A
-1000 ms, server receives input, shoots player A
-1050 ms, player A receives input for player B's first attack
-1150 ms, player A displays player B's interpolated movement
-1500 ms, server receives input, shoots and kills player A
-1550 ms, player A receives input for second attack, and death
It's pretty late and I haven't been getting much sleep this week, so I hope I did that all correctly. In the first example, the low latency player (A) pops out and attacks the high latency player (. Player B is already dead long before they see player A. In the second example (high latency attacking low latency), the low latency player (A) still has a full 300 ms to shoot back before they are killed.
Unfortunately, player A can't really take any evasive action in time because player B is still shooting at them in the past. This cuts both ways, though. Player B wouldn't be able to dodge player A's bullets either. So overall, it's still advantageous to have a lower latency. Especially because a low latency player has this undodgeable problem only when fighting a lagger, whereas the lagger has this problem when fighting with anyone. But in practice, perhaps the lagger has a sort of psychological advantage, because their gameplay is not consistent with the rest of your opponents?
What sort of Interpolation work are our clients doing? Will it eventually be possible for us to tune interp settings? (Again, if not in general, maybe for pvp?)
Firefall client's simulation is pretty dependent on being able to precisely interpolate hitbox positions. The interpolation delay is set dynamically to something sensible for your connection. My gut feeling is that making it user-tweakable will end up causing more harm than good. How would you plan on tuning it?