Spectating other players is poor due to down-sampled animations
A fairly core part skateboarding to me is taking turns doing a line with buddies. Whenever I've done that in a party in this game, the down sampled animations make it borderline unwatchable. Even at its smoothest its hard to tell what tricks are happening so you just can't appreciate a good trick or line.
I guess this is a byproduct of a server-authoritative model, where the servers have to be the arbiter of all physics for all players simultaneously and optimize massive amounts of netwrk data. The super smooth and detailed tricks we see on our screen are passed to the server and downsampled for everyone else for the purposeof server stability.
imo this is an issue in a social skating game. At least people in your party should be almost as high fidelity / detailed as watching your own replay so we can actually appreciate exactly what others are doing.
I wont pretend to have the solution but there must be something like a p2p hybird model for party members, or just some way to offload some physics to our clients without completely compromising the purpose of a server authoritative model.
e: for context I've got gigabit fibre, checked both my ping to EA servers while im connected via tracing the route and pingplotter. My ping is like 15-30ms, 0 packet loss. I've never seen a smooth animation from another player, it's always extremely janky. I can see this is the same for every person who streams skate too like milky, pigeon, etc.
