I've pasted your question in Chargpt and this is the answer: No, you're absolutely not tripping. And honestly, paying attention to bullet trails is a pretty reasonable way to question what's happening, because what you're visually seeing and what the game is actually registering as a hit are not necessarily the same thing. What you're describing sounds very much like a combination of server-side hit registration, latency compensation, and client-server desynchronization. And there's a particularly annoying part of this: the game can be behaving exactly as its netcode was designed to behave while showing you something that looks completely wrong. Let me break it down. 1. Bullet trails aren't necessarily where the server thinks the bullets went This is probably the biggest thing you're noticing. In many multiplayer shooters, there are effectively two perspectives: Your client: What your computer renders. This includes enemy positions, muzzle flashes, tracers, animations, and hit effects. The server: The authoritative version of the game. It decides where players were, where shots were fired, and whether those shots connected. A bullet tracer can be a visual representation of a shot rather than the authoritative path used for hit detection. That means you can potentially see: A tracer pass directly through someone's character, but the server registers a miss. A tracer seemingly miss someone, but the server registers a hit. A tracer travel through a wall because the visual effect and actual collision calculation aren't perfectly synchronized. In other words, the tracer isn't necessarily a reliable representation of the hitbox interaction. 2. Peeker's advantage makes this even worse This is where your corner-peeking example becomes particularly interesting. Imagine this: An enemy sees you around a corner. They fire at your position. Their client sends the shot information to the server. Your client hasn't yet received all the updated information. The server evaluates the shot using its authoritative state and potentially lag compensation. You receive damage despite visually seeing the bullets pass you. This is one reason you can feel like you've been shot behind cover. Peeking into VALORANT's Netcode | Riot Games Technology technology.riotgames.com The server may be evaluating the shot against a historical position of your character, rather than the exact position you see on your screen at the moment the damage appears. 3. The wall penetration thing is especially interesting There are two possibilities here: Latency compensation: The server evaluates the shot against a slightly older version of the world, where the target was still exposed. Actual hit-registration or collision bugs: The server's collision calculation doesn't match what the client visually represents. The second possibility isn't hypothetical. Respawn has actually discussed bugs involving projectile trajectory calculations and hit registration in Apex Legends. They've even described internal debugging tools that draw bullet trajectories and hitboxes to identify discrepancies. ea.com So yes, sometimes it really can be a game problem rather than your connection. 4. Why it might feel worse in this particular game A few things can contribute: Issue What you experience High ping Getting hit after reaching cover Packet loss Inconsistent hit registration Server tick rate Delayed updates to player positions Client prediction Visuals don't perfectly match server state Lag compensation Shots connect against historical positions Collision bugs Shots interact incorrectly with hitboxes or geometry These aren't just theoretical explanations. Riot has published a fairly detailed breakdown of how VALORANT handles server-authoritative shooting and rewinds player positions to evaluate shots. playvalorant.com NVIDIA researchers have also experimentally measured peeker's advantage under different network conditions. Research But I actually want to know something. What game are you experiencing this in? Because there's a pretty significant difference between how games like: VALORANT Rainbow Six Siege Apex Legends Call of Duty Battlefield handle bullets, hitboxes, server authority, and latency compensation. And I don't want to just throw generic networking terminology at you. Also, if you have those clips, I'd genuinely be interested in examining them. Particularly the ones where the bullet trails visibly pass through walls. I want to distinguish between three things: Normal latency compensation making the visuals misleading. Poor synchronization between client-side visuals and server-side hit registration. An actual collision or hit-registration bug. Because getting shot behind cover is one thing. Consistently watching bullets visibly travel through geometry is another.

Yeah, I think it’s mostly latency. Players are connected by peer-to-peer networking, rather than dedicated servers, so latency is more of an issue. Any discrepancy between what people see on their screens can cause odd stuff to happen. On a related note, I’ve noticed far less bullet trails passing through solid objects in D2 compared to D1. I don’t know if that’s because they improved the networking or they just hid the latency better.

The damage ref hasn't been updated in years, we're playing on like 2020 or 2019 or 2018 tech. I somehow put up a game where I had 14 assists--that the tell that your connection to the game is flawed.