First, please watch these videos:

All of the above issues are still in the final game. The worst case is number 3(Watch the first video). Hitting and not dealing any damage. It is especially apparent when you have 4 or 5 people shooting at each other. It seems like it's random when the bullets actually do any damage. Note that I am playing the Xbox 360 version, making it even worse.

I wish I had captured footage when I was playing today. This is exactly what happens: I see an enemy, I aim down the sights and aim at the enemy, I pull the trigger using a Support class gun(100 bullets in magazine), empty at least 30 rounds, and none of them damage him. This happens in every server, no matter what the ping is. Another example: Enemy was prone near a pillar, I was standing right on top of him, without aiming down the sight, I shoot at him and empty a whole clip. He takes me out with his pistol and in the "Killer Cam" he has 100% health.

This really angers me because none of that crap was in either Bad Company games. How could they mess it up so bad?

I sent a couple of tweets to their support team but they haven't responded.

@Daiphyer said:

First, please watch these videos:

only because you said please :)

edit: now for a real comment, i know what you mean. i too play on the xbox and have experienced all of the above problems

it gets really annoying when it happens, and its not as infrequent as one might think

I didn't really experience any issues with it in retail and personally I thought they had it all fixed up from the beta. So honestly, I didn't really see the issue.

Knifes have been awful since the beta as well.  You can hit a guy, see blood draw, and it won't kill him or start the animations. 
 
The hit detection issues affect the shotgun a lot, you see someone close quarters, shoot and clearly hit them point blank and not damage them, and then they kill you before you can shoot again.

@Ben_H said:

Knifes have been awful since the beta as well. You can hit a guy, see blood draw, and it won't kill him or start the animations.

The knives have been basically nerfed in this game. If it isn't from behind you can almost guarantee it won't work.

@kermoosh said:

only because you said please :)

It's an uncommon word these days.

@kermoosh said:

now for a real comment, i know what you mean. i too play on the xbox and have experienced all of the above problems

it gets really annoying when it happens, and its not as infrequent as one might think

It gets real bad in close-quarters matches. It almost seems like the game can't handle anything beyond 1v1 at any given time.

@Daiphyer said:

It gets real bad in close-quarters matches. It almost seems like the game can't handle anything beyond 1v1 at any given time.

That's a pretty accurate assumption, I feel. Any time I take on 2 opponents at once who AREN'T looking at me, at least one of them will survive with more than 50% health. If I take on 3, sometimes NONE of them will die, though it's hard to say how much life they all had.

There is always lag to account for such things. I know when I play on high lag servers (for example on our UK server, while I am in California) I see similar issues at times.

@Ben_H said:

Knifes have been awful since the beta as well. You can hit a guy, see blood draw, and it won't kill him or start the animations. The hit detection issues affect the shotgun a lot, you see someone close quarters, shoot and clearly hit them point blank and not damage them, and then they kill you before you can shoot again.

Knifing from the back does instant kill. Knifing from the front does like 30% damage. FYI.

@Ben_H said:

Knifes have been awful since the beta as well. You can hit a guy, see blood draw, and it won't kill him or start the animations.

Ugh, I know. Countless times I've tried knifing someone, feeling pretty confident that I'm catching him off guard... but no, nothing happens and he turns around and shoots me.

And they always kill me so easily with them too. Aggravating.

@clstirens said:

@Daiphyer said:

It gets real bad in close-quarters matches. It almost seems like the game can't handle anything beyond 1v1 at any given time.

That's a pretty accurate assumption, I feel. Any time I take on 2 opponents at once who AREN'T looking at me, at least one of them will survive with more than 50% health. If I take on 3, sometimes NONE of them will die, though it's hard to say how much life they all had.

Ditto. It seems like whenever there are two opponents, and I take one of them out, the one behind or right next to him won't take any damage for a short while. I have come up with two possible reasons, and I am probably wrong in both cases: A. The game still thinks the dead opponent's body is still there, and it's covering my shots. B. Game's too busy registering the kill and it's falling behind on the action.

@mosdl said:

There is always lag to account for such things. I know when I play on high lag servers (for example on our UK server, while I am in California) I see similar issues at times.

Correct. That's why I made a topic to see if other people have had this problem or not. And from I've gathered from Youtube comments, forums and such, I am not the only one.

@RobertOrri said:

@Ben_H said:

Knifes have been awful since the beta as well. You can hit a guy, see blood draw, and it won't kill him or start the animations.

Ugh, I know. Countless times I've tried knifing someone, feeling pretty confident that I'm catching him off guard... but no, nothing happens and he turns around and shoots me.

And they always kill me so easily with them too. Aggravating.

That's what you get when you try to have a flashy animation in the middle of a multiplayer match. I don't understand why they couldn't just stick with the knifing animation from BF:BC2. That was almost perfect.

@Seppli said:

@Ben_H said:

Knifes have been awful since the beta as well. You can hit a guy, see blood draw, and it won't kill him or start the animations. The hit detection issues affect the shotgun a lot, you see someone close quarters, shoot and clearly hit them point blank and not damage them, and then they kill you before you can shoot again.

Knifing from the back does instant kill. Knifing from the front does like 30% damage. FYI.

No, I know that. I'm saying it doesn't detect a hit half the time unless they are perfectly still and even then it doesn't work. The knife is much worse than BC2, and even that one was worse than BF2, where there was no animation outside of the swing at all but if it hit them you got your kill, which is best for a multiplayer game. It feels like the animation messes up knife kills a lot more than it should.

Sometimes you have the touch of death on a particular server and sometimes you can't kill someone for the life of you. My usual remedy is to switch servers until I find one that's working. Might be ping, might be server hardware, I can't say.

Not saying you should be able to hit 0% of the time but firing an LMG (Support class weapon) from anything but prone with bipod should be pretty damn inaccurate. If anything I'm getting the opposite effect where it seems (and I emphasize that word) a single shot or a burst of three is enough to take me out with absolutely zero time to react. Fine if we're talking about an accurate weapon like an assault or sniper rifle, but not with an LMG designed more or less to keep bad guys' heads down. It seems the M27 IAR is the most common source of this. I know this guy's probably shooting at me longer than I realize and the server maybe isn't informing me fully of the situation, but it's frustrating nonetheless.

On the knives, I actually like the change that Seppli pointed out. Too many times in BC2 did I have a guy charge into a stream of fire and knife me to death. Now we have the opposite problem where I creep up on a guy who's gone prone and instead of the insta-death animation I get the basic knife-swipe for 30% damage. This serves to alert the person who more often than not turns and kills me. The insta-death animation doesn't reset fast enough for me to recover.

I've always had hitbox problems in Battlefield games, and it's disappointing this one holds the tradition (though maybe not as bad as BC2). I have definitely noticed it's extremely hard to chain kills as pointed out above. I've always chalked it up to "what you see and what the server sees are two different things" and tried to carry on.

I'm on PC, but I've found generally that it has good rego for me...except the occasional close quarters battle.

Personally, I love the knife animation as it is both satisfying as fuck while also creating a risk/reward dynamic.

Shotguns are terrible and it doesn't seem to matter when I play. I came around the corner shot a guy laying on the ground from just a few feet away 3 times with the SAIGA 12 and he killed me and it was one on one. I have hit detection problems with other guns but nothing like with the shotguns.

I actually had a guy running towards me with his knive out, I started to back up and shoot, then the animation kicked in and I was actually pulled towards him and knived... with my gun poppin rounds into his face. It's almost like when the animation kicked in the game decided I was dead, even though I wasn't, and nothing I could do would change my fate.

Experiencing these problems pissed me off so much that I've decided that I'm just going to wait for a while until the game is patched and hopefully stable enough to be playable. Especially with the bolt-action rifle at close ranges (one of the coolest things to be able to do in BF3 for me). It's really just worth switching to my handgun all of the time now because firing the rifle at them, at close range, while they're standing still, does nothing except alert them and their machine gun to my presence.

@vonFlampanker said:

Not saying you should be able to hit 0% of the time but firing an LMG (Support class weapon) from anything but prone with bipod should be pretty damn inaccurate. If anything I'm getting the opposite effect where it seems (and I emphasize that word) a single shot or a burst of three is enough to take me out with absolutely zero time to react. Fine if we're talking about an accurate weapon like an assault or sniper rifle, but not with an LMG designed more or less to keep bad guys' heads down. It seems the M27 IAR is the most common source of this. I know this guy's probably shooting at me longer than I realize and the server maybe isn't informing me fully of the situation, but it's frustrating nonetheless.

You can't tell me that I won't hit my opponent when I have him in my sight and I pull the trigger with an LMG.(And no I don't just spray, I usually do 3-shot bursts) What is this Alpha Protocol?

@vonFlampanker said:

I've always had hitbox problems in Battlefield games, and it's disappointing this one holds the tradition (though maybe not as bad as BC2). I have definitely noticed it's extremely hard to chain kills as pointed out above. I've always chalked it up to "what you see and what the server sees are two different things" and tried to carry on.

Bad Company 2 had none of these problems. I played about 120hours of that game, and never experienced not being able to kill two guys at once. This is a huge step backwards.

The shooting in the retail game is heavenly compared to the beta. Yes, sometimes I notice getting hit/killed after I jump into cover, sometimes the bullet damage can be crazy and cause instant non-headshot kills, and sometimes I shoot for days and the enemy survives, but those only happen rarely. 
Overall BF3's hit registration is fucking phenomenal.

@Daiphyer: Re: LMGs - Didn't say you wouldn't hit, just saying it should not be the equivalent of a 100-round assault rifle at medium-to-long range. (I should add that I rarely play Support at the moment, I mostly play Engineer/Assault) My perception at the moment is that I get one, two or three hit indications (sound + slight jump of view) before I'm dropped. Killcam then shows a guy at a decent distance spraying from the hip. I realize this is a game, but the LMGs don't really perform their real-world role. At least not how most people use them. I thought before the game was released that the suppression would only apply to LMGs, which I thought made a lot of sense. I'd be curious to know how many bursts it typically takes you do drop a guy from, say, 20m-30m? Do you typically get a lot of success with the LMG much further out?

I remember some guys did a Left 4 Dead test where they turned on all the bullet paths so you could see the accuracy and spread of each weapon. I'd VERY much like to see such a thing for BF3. If for no other reason than to prove that I'm wrong and it's only my perception.

I don't really want this conversation to become a pissing match about experience but I played ~430 hours of Bad Company 2 and did indeed run into these problems. Shotgun-related, especially. I think the larger issue is not any individual's experience but that people seem to have inconsistent experiences with these games. To restate: the only thing I can think of is that it varies by server.

I've definitely experienced the cover issue a number of times. I don't even feel safe now until I've been behind cover for at least a second without getting hit.

The knifing, too, is pretty piss poor. DICE is so in love with both the knifing and vaulting animations that they sacrifice playability for them. A few times, I've tried knifing someone who I'm pretty positive I was behind, only to do the weak slash animation instead. And good luck vaulting through large, open windows with any sort of consistency.

These issues are a lot of the reason I can't get serious about these games at all. I just want to fly helicopters into tanks and layer four C4 on an unsuspecting sniper. The "hey I got behind cover" issue is prevalent in all of the Dice games since 1943. It just frustrates me because the medic bag item EXISTS to promote running away from encounters that you know you aren't going to win, and when the game decides to make me drop dead 5 feet after I turn a corner towards a medic (support in this game?) I just lose all will to actually play competitively.

@vonFlampanker: At that distance, usually 20-30 with a LMG. I realize that 1v1 any LMG is much weaker than an AR, that's the way it's supposed to be. But then giving ARs to medics makes the support class USELESS. Dropping ammo doesn't give you enough points, and most people don't stand to take them anyway, couple that with the nerfed LMGs and it's a pain in the ass to play support.

I usually had alot more luck with the LMGs in BC2. They were actually my favorite guns. I took out oh so many snipers from almost sniper distances with the LMGs in that game. In this game, I feel like the only times I have a slight chance of dropping an opponent with a LMG is when they are unaware of me.

@Daiphyer: See, something's definitely up if the guy who plays support thinks the LMG is underpowered and the guy who plays Engineer is tired of getting killed too quickly by 'em. I think it probably reinforces your original point. Ah well, I hope they stay invested in updates and fixes.

@FireBurger said:

I've definitely experienced the cover issue a number of times. I don't even feel safe now until I've been behind cover for at least a second without getting hit.

A common and frustrating problem to be sure.

Incidentally, I feel that I should mention that the OP's first video is from the beta, and therefore not relevant to any discussion of the present version of the game.

Game is broken, I have had trouble wanting to go back to it.

I have experienced the retreating behind cover and then taking hits, and the dead on shots not registering anything and seemingly instanteous non-headshot deaths (admittedly these do seem to occur at the hands of better players) in the current patched retail version.
In the second video I feel your shots may be registering as hitting the block you are hiding behind. I've noticed that this seems to occur sometimes if you are barely around a corner or shooting through or a fence/railing/foliage or other seemingly transparent/permeable parts of the environment.

The hit detection has been janky since the patch which was meant to improve it. I was playing before and I shoot at a guy, I can only see his head and possibly the top of his shoulders. Hit marker, no kill, another hit marker no kill, another hit marker, no kill. How can I shoot a guy, in the head, get several hit markers and not get a kill.

I've been playing a lot of sniper lately, and I can tell you, the hit registration is not broken. What you, and the people in that video are experiencing is lag.