Facestab...

It's a gltich Valve couldn't fix since TF2 was established.

Did you also know that 1 in 5 back stabs will fail. You will hear the crit noise and see the knife motion for a back stab, but nothing will happen.

Crazy Eh?
 
I've definitely noticed that... crucial supposedly missed stabs end up getting me killed... goes through the motion, makes the sound... but no dead body!
 
Very rarely (~1% of the time) does a facestab ever strike the actual face.

Things to remember:
(taken from my guide here: http://www.edgegamers.org/forums/showthread.php?t=50757)

A lot of people complain about facestabs, and I want you to take the following 3 things into account next time:
-Lag compensation means the attacker is favored. To the Spy, you may have had your back turned.
-If a Spy passes you and quickly turns around and stabs, it will look like he stabbed you in the face in first person, even though he stabbed your back.
-The 180 degree FOV deal is rather touchy and weird, and so is the timing. If they get that downward backstab animation, and you don't move promptly, you're pretty much done for.
 
Yes, its extremely annoying when you're healing someone, we both see the spy, and the stab kills one of us when we're facing the spy. Ugh. !bang !argh
 
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I've definitely noticed that... crucial supposedly missed stabs end up getting me killed... goes through the motion, makes the sound... but no dead body!

This is because the FOV is touchy and in general if it misses or does normal knife damage it's because one or both of you moved in such a way that the backstab animation doesn't hit the 180 degrees behind their front view hitbox. It's important to note that the damage isn't dealt at all until you hit them, and it checks the hitbox twice, when you initiate the stab (which triggers the animation) and when you actually stab them. So in theory if they have their back turned, and turn around fast enough that lag compensation doesn't favor you enough, you'll stab the front of their hitbox and do normal knife damage. Usually (most of the time) lag compensation favors you enough that they'll turn around but to you the hitbox is still a little behind and you stab their "back" which shows up as a facestab but it isn't really.

The rest of the times just seems to be caused by lag if anything.

---

There really isn't a "problem" with facestabs, it's just that people fail to take into account the effects of lag compensation and how much it favors the attacker, and that backstabs don't actually target the back, but rather 180 degrees of where they face at any given moment and if you are targeting that. (ie: stand on top of guy, target back of head, you backstab.)
 
As a Spy player, I couldn't tell you how much more common it is for a back stab to fail (as in, you stab, make the noise and animation, but no kill) than it is to get a facestab.

Just consider it karma when you get "facestabbed".
 
Most of the time they are not Facestabs, it just looks like it. Ping/Lag plays a major roll in the spy, and when you compare the two player's hitboxes and ping you get, FACESTAB.
 
Most of the time they are not Facestabs, it just looks like it. Ping/Lag plays a major roll in the spy, and when you compare the two player's hitboxes and ping you get, FACESTAB.

Agreed. The mechanics of FPS games really start to break down when people are in close proximity. Pings start to have a massive effect of what you see and what really happened. I've seen this happen in CSS (I've been stabbed so many times by someone who appears 10 feet away from me) as well as many other games. In my opinion Halo was the worst.

-Groo
 
lol. :-) people call it facestab, imo, because there is s light latency issue between clients sometimes and it causes lag. this lag in turn causes a slight delay in the hit boxes for the players. once these hitboxes are not in line with the clients, the spy (client a) can now stab the heavy/soldier (client b) and kill on one hit (with backstab). So if client b rants and raves about being facestabbed... than it wasnt client a's fault that facestabbing came up. haha! I know what you mean. People should jus say backstab
 
I had a personal first true facestab last night. Most of them are the obvious latency induced facestabs, but this was the real sasquatch. As sniper on our battlements on 2fort, I was backpedaling away from a spy toward our secondary spawn. The spy was facing me and was quite some distance away. He swings the knife and I hear the crit noise. You know the rest :)

Just based on the timing of the whole thing, it would have been literally impossible for him to be in any part of my FOV but the front 90 degrees or so. I know this because I was killed in one of the narrow doorways on the battlements, while he was still on the other side. On the server I was playing on, he had a stable ping in the 20s and mine was stable in the teens. I think the knife just reached through the front of my hitbox to the back or something.

I think a lot of facestabs and missed backstabs would disappear if they'd drop their insistance on animation -> stab. The animation just needs to go.
 
the animation needs to stay tbh.

but it needs to hit, but still let the animation play out.

The long animation separates good spies from bad spies because good spies will break the long animation often anyways (from proper distancing or quickstabbing) and that skill barrier is good because it makes the class deep and take time to properly master. It's like mastering a Scout's double jump techniques, a Soldier's Rocket Jump, etc.
 
Keep facestabs. It's good for a spy once in a while to have a backstab register. Or is it a failed backstab? =S
 
Yea the other day I was walking backwards facing a spy and he was infront of me stabbing, I eventually hit a wall and stopped moving and he caught up to me and stabbed me in the face for an instant kill!
 
Still going to have to disagree. All the various animations do in the game is screw people who have lag. Lag compensation doesn't eliminate this. Same goes for the reload anims on a soldier/demo.
 

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