Monsters attacks.
It seems to me that they are all predetermined. Sometimes I get hit when I have my shield on and the monster isn't even attacking.
Sometimes the monster attacks in a different direction and I get hit.
WTF is this?
It doesn't help that the monsters in this game are op anyway.
Fix the attacks. Infact, I think they should fix these before the continue to expand the game. Work out whats wrong with what you have before you start on something else.
I am seriously pissed.
I know what you mean--taking damage from attacks that clearly hit while my shield is up (without breaking the shield), getting hit by attacks from monsters that aren't anywhere near me on the screen. One time I was rubber-banded from the center of a room to some spikes in a corner which the game then refused to let me leave--every time I tried to move, it would just rubber-band me back to the same spot. The spikes eventually killed me. It was nonsense--I really should have reported it.
I think, though, that what you and I were experience was just latency or graphics lag (or both). You see the attack go through your shield, but what your screen is showing is not what the server thinks is happening. You see the swing going off somewhere nowhere near where you are, but the server thinks that you're right there getting hit.
I agree that it's a problem, but it's probably not a problem on which we're going to see substantial improvement. Turn down your graphics options and hope for good latency. I just don't think there's a whole lot to be fixed on OOO's end.
Every game with online gameplay has some form of lag. How the game handles or tries to compensate for this lag varies, and certain systems will utilize certain solutions better than others. In most RTS games, for instance, what you see on the screen is what is actually happening, but as a result there will be input lag between when you enter commands and when these commands are carried out.
In other games with more personal interfaces (i.e. Spiral Knights), this is not an option, and therefore the game may SHOW you acting as soon as you input a command, but what actually happens on the server may or may not reflect that, causing the game to "correct" itself on the end-user's client every now and then. There's also a hybrid between the two, where the SERVER corrects itself according to what happens on the end-user's client, but this tends to result in a great big mess and as far as I know is not the system Spiral Knights uses. Regardless, lag causes problems with things happening that, by all appearances, shouldn't have (or things NOT happening that SHOULD have). It's most apparent in the Snarbolax battle, where gongs of the bell will frequently fail to register no matter how close Snarby is to it.
So yeah. OOO, fix your netcode. It's inefficient.
It could also simply be a problem with what frames the monster's attack is considered active in its entire animation. For example, I believe the zombie's jump attack has its damage hitbox active for much longer than what the animation would lead you to believe. I can think of a few offline fighting games with this problem, for instance.
Granted, there's still the possibility of latency, of course, so I can't come up with anything conclusive. But it's still a possibility that being able to test in an offline environment could solve.
It's called lag. Deal with it.