Change Predicted frames' behavior to align with other Network settings#639

I really love to play this game and I’m still confused why every network setting works the same, except for Predicted frames. I don’t like to play with very high predicted frames as this can cause a lot of unnecessary rollback issues for me, and so I always try to remember to adjust my network settings at the start of a match - 2, 0, 0. But if you check it before the 2nd round, Predicted frames returns to default, despite the rest of this menu retaining whatever changes you made from the first round. This is very frustrating and forgetting to change your network settings for even a single round is insanely punishing. Why is the game forcing me to use network settings when I have already changed my network settings this match? They should ALL retain the values that the player has set, and it confuses me every time I play that Predicted Frames acts uniquely.

No other modern online competitive game requires this kind of babysitting from the player, and personally it can be really hard to get into flow-state or play for longer sessions when I have a vastly different experience depending on if I remembered to do my UI special combo before the round or not.. Settings>Network Settings>Predicted Frames>Hold Left>Save>Start just is completely Unnecessary when most games just expect Press Start to play the game. But in this game, if I just Press Start to play the game, even once - my fun, fast-paced plat-fighter becomes a guessing game because my opponent will suddenly teleport and rollback on every neutral interaction.

Every single round. Every round you’ve gotta change you network settings. In a match that goes through all three rounds, yep that’s three times you’ve gotta change your network settings. 2 Ranked games that go to 3 rounds each? Now you’ve changed your network settings 6 times, and you’ve only been playing for about 20 minutes! You can see how this can get tiring.

Here’s another quick argument for this specific change: The fact that this one Network setting’s behavior is not aligned with the behavior of the rest of this menu is very unclear language. There is no place in the game which states that these settings will react differently to my inputs, which makes me think it is unintentional and therefore a harmful bug for the player to overcome. As well, this feature is also causing other similar features to become functionally useless. Somewhere within the UI code, there exists some amount of lines which specifies my preferred Jitter frames, which is saved between rounds. These such lines are functionally useless to me, as they clearly exist to avoid me the specific tedium of opening this menu so frequently. Because Predicted frames’ behavior does not align with the behavior of the other settings in this menu, I cannot avoid the tedium of opening this menu. In order to play my favorite game, I need to open this specific menu or else I will not have very much fun.

So, change Predicted Frames’ behavior so that it saves the player’s preference between rounds, similar to the behavior of Jitter Frames and Frame Delay.
These other settings are saved between rounds, but due to Predicted Frames always returning to default, this quality of life is functionally useless to those who prefer to play with less than 8 Predicted Frames.
This is functionally forcing the player to play with suboptimal or specifically harmful network settings - thus requiring the player to overcome this by repeatedly inputting the same exact information into the menu in order to play with different amounts of Predicted Frames, which can have a significant impact on gameplay smoothness and clarity.

@LeftEar262 I tested this today by setting my values from the defaults of 2/8/1 to new values of 3/2/2 and it kept those values through all games in a ranked set. When playing the next ranked set, the values returned to 2/8/1. As far as I can tell, there is no difference between how different network settings are remembered. What values were you setting the network settings to? I’m trying to recreate this and not succeeding.

Just a suggestion on reproduction, perhaps changing other settings is causing the setting they’re see be reset to save.