I wonder why no one reported this yet. Description: Sometimes when enemy fire a mortar at you, the mortar looks flying toward a different direction(with bizarre angle and trajectory too), but it's in fact flying toward at you. I am not sure if the people firing the mortar sees the same thing. No valid reproduction steps, it looks pretty random and MIGHT not be a coding bug.
Well, sometimes I see my own mortar getting deflected by some kind of edge and it still hits the spot I aimed for. Once one of my mortars actually was supposed to hit the jeep but instead it deflected off the jeep hitting the ground. HL2 engine is weird.
When mortar shell is fired, you get its initial position, time and direction. After that it's fully simulated on the client, there aren't any corrections after sending data once. That means that if your latency is not consistent, you'll have time error big enough to make the shell appear to fly differently than it does on the server.
Simulation Fire ---------50 meters--------------A(Where mortar actually go, explosion happens at here)) | 5 meters | B (Where mortar go and disappear FOR ME, no explosion) It's THIS weird, I am not sure if this is what you mean. Also, what I am curious about is it happened a lot recently. If that's just coincidence then okay.
I am also going to throw out there, you usually play with like 300 to 400 ping. I would not be suprised if shit just disappears for you on a regular basis.