/v/ - Video Games

>enter duel

>dos opponent

durrrrrrrrr

Because peer to peer is trash for video games. How can you even think this is a good idea?

>>14869261

I guess I don't understand p2p well enough. Why is it a bad idea?

>>14869263

see >>14869260

>>14869263

If the players are in control of the network they will use that to their advantage. Not to mention, how is a company going to make money if the players don't have to connect to a server? If one copy of the game is enough to play piracy is easy.

>>14869279

Those are good points. What about this.

>Just keep a single server up. It's just a database of registered accounts with matching product keys.

>game software doesn't automatically connect p2p with others. first it checks in with the database server. once it authenticates, it boots the p2p connection

Or is this just how it's done already and I'm only reinventing a shitty wheel?

where will you store player accounts and passwords?

what if player/node will modify other player actions and steal their items?

>>14869260

>make MMO where you play as a hacker in a cyberpunk world

>dossing people is a legitimate strategy

>>14869289

what if someone makes a crack that won't connect to master server for license check and will connect straight to p2p's?

>>14869297

Have the game check in with the master server every 5 or 10 minutes.

>what if someone cracks that?

this is why games use proprietary file types, isn't it? to slow down cracks? If you want to reverse engineer it, you'd have to make a purchase of the legitimate game here, wouldn't you? Be a good goy before you go sailing the high seas.

Surely the company would want to make expansions, giving them an opportunity for more product keys, keeping crackers at bay for another round. If the company wants to abandon the game, then there's already a foundation for preservation, and the crackers could just disseminate copies that bypass all the authentication checks and now you're left with a game that's simply maintained by players leaving their clients running. That can't be all bad, can it?

>>14869290

There is also this point. How are you going to store a database in a safe manner? How are you going to use it in real time?

>>14869327

I'm not really sure. I never looked into net security. How do they do it now? What's wrong with doing it that way?

>>14869279

So, it is the best solution ever.

>>14869289

reinventing a shitty wheel, i think warframe is peer2peer if i recall

>>14869349

>>14869345

ah, so it IS done. What's the reason that it isn't done more?

>>14869345

>Warframe do this.

I remember an anon from the warframe thread talking about some hacks he made in the thread. Being able to spawn into someone's full session as an invincible stalker and other stuff. Quite interesting, I wish I could get into it.

>>14869336

It's not about net security, it's about not having a traditional centralised database. Nearly everything happening in an MMO uses the database, if your database is distributed forget about using it in real time with even just few players. Then you have to worry about keeping each peer from forging database changes.

>>14869355

because it's only used for pve, limited to a few users and is susceptible to hacking unless you do some authentication checks (game data, data being requested & data being submitted) which bogs down the network experience depending on how you implement it.

Isn't PSO2 procedurally generated and not a theme park MMO? I think OP is talking about theme park MMOs like WoW.

>>14869367

Themepark and sandbox MMOs.

>>14869369

>nProtect

is this what devs use to anti cheat p2p MMOs?

>>14869369

>WF is filled with cheaters and hackers that are banned on daily basis

Really? I thought they had little anti-cheat due to it being pretty much entirely a PvE game.

>>14869381

>people who cheat don't cheat just because they can

>they cheat so they can win against someone else

I will never understand this. You aren't the "better player" if you cheat, so surely cheating is done for the fun of cheating. But then you're suggesting this isn't true.

Okay, so no easy way to run themepark MMOs without the servers to beegin with. And too many players will use p2p connections to their advantage.

p2p works better in instanced worlds. The HUB world could be on server but the meat of the game, the labrynths or planets, could be instanced via p2p with smaller parties. And of course any event involving more than 100 players could require a server.

>>14869389

>You aren't the "better player" if you cheat, so surely cheating is done for the fun of cheating

Of course most people think this, but there really exist some people who will use aimbots in fps, for example, and think they're the best around.

>>14869426

Why, though? Are their brains broken or something? They do realize they have an unfair advantage that they'd do poorly without, right?

>>14869434

>Why, though?

Some people just think differently from me or you. I'm sure it's rooted in some kind of disorder.

>They do realize they have an unfair advantage that they'd do poorly without, right?

A few of them know this openly, and simply enjoy trolling others.

Deep down, most of them probably realize this.

And some might be so delusional that it hasn't even crossed their minds.

>>14869454

sounds like women, or children of single mothers.

Because companies care to keep their microtransactions online and doesn't want you to tinker with their stuff.

Lets take Path of Exile for example.They made Solo Self Found mode which turns a game into single player one and you still can only play it always online just so you won't tinker with server files. If you will give people server program, they would eventually start to create mods, offline versions and private servers. All of them have one thing in common and this is that company doesn't have their microtransaction shop in them.

Obviously official explanation is to not give cheaters possibility to cheat but really even GGG themselves made fun of PoE being P2W because there is no winning in that game.

Here is what I am talking about: https://hooktube.com/watch?v=w19sqGjmNlY

Of course explanation will differ from game to game but of F2P model with microtransactions it is reason.

In an MMORPG the server is the authority, in a torrent the hash verifies you're getting the correct data. Basically I think what you want is MMORPGs on the blockchain - I don't think the tech is there yet - way too slow.

>>14869271

>>14869260

Wasn't this big in For Honor, where people installed a switch to stop internet, or slow it for a second to lightning jump slaughter someone?

>>14869261

>he doesn't know about the perils of host migration

>>14870310

Isn't that those times when pvp games has the host disconnect then everyone gets booted to the lobby? Is a host really necessary in a p2p game? If it's necessary to retain persistence, can't there be multiple hosts? If something happens to the president, there's the vice president to step in. Can't you do something like that?

>>14870342

Don't forget the whole clientside setup of a lot of it. People with shitty internet have the advantage in a lot of ways.

>>14870351

The ping timeout of planetside is about a minute I shit you not, at some point I told the guys "hey watch this" unplugged the router next to my PC on my old setup and rushed a vanu infested room with a max, shot them all and plugged it back in and ran out.

what happened is as follows:

1. people started moving normally again rather than people walking through walls and out into space on the course they were on when I unplugged

2. I suddenly started getting lots of kills

3. I rubberbanded back into the vanu room and then back to where I was standing outside

4. died

I cleared the whole room because planetside decided to accept every single thing I did clientside after a full 30 seconds or so.

>>14869355

>What's the reason that it isn't done more?

because it only work on HUB-like game. warframe is one of them.

you do not need dedicate server in a pve coop game with no persistent univers to maintain.

just instance your party and do one mission.

imo thoses HUB game are not "mmo" in the strict sense of it. just online multiplayer game with a virtual HUB were you can meet people. (ex: PSO, not warframe are they even people dum enouth to call warframe a mmo? they do not even have a HUB aside from a guild area)

>>14869434

>why use aimbot?

simple

in a killstreak game: you can have fun with thoses.

in BF-like game: it allow you to get much much more exp through ribon etc

cheating is not about being better or whatever.

who did not cheat ina single player game ?

be it the sims, sin of solar to start as the imperium-like faction and do your own innefficient RP.

it's 2018 it is about time people learn that cheating is not necessarily use to win

too bad i can't find the conference of that guy at defcon who explained his reason to cheat

>>14869252

The reason why Peer2peer MMO's aren't more common is because they are laggy as fuck whilst also inherently having shit progression.

There are a LOT of peer2peer MMO's. Maplestory, Vindictus and Warframe are some good examples. You know what all of those games have in common? You have to grind your fucking ass off for god damn hours, and skill isn't involved at all.

The reason why that is is because that's the only way to gateway progression without making it hackable. In all of those games, people still hack to do all kinds of shit; but they're very constrained and over time what the hacks are capable shrunk away.

For example, in Vindictus, hackers can easily instantly clear a mission and get the rewards. This however is a complete waste of time because:

>A: A minimum time has to pass before you get rewards. If you clear a mission faster than this, you have to wait for your rewards. You can actually hit this time limit with speedrunning as well.

>B: All the good rewards are bound to end-of-mission rewards, with valuable items always being of the "low drop rate" variety, rather than the "its hard to beat the mission but you always get them" variety like WoW.

The end result is a game where you have to grind forever and your skill is completely meaningless. There is no "organize 40 retards to actually finish a fucking raid god damn" World of Warcraft has where you're guaranteed to get good rewards if you manage to pull through. All you get is doing the same shit, over and over, either getting slow-but-steady progression or RNG progression. Both are grinding cancer and not exactly engaging.

Of course, you can say "fuck progression, let them cheat!". But then you just removed the entire economy from the game, which is one of the major selling points that make MMO's so interesting.

>>14869260

>not bouncing data off of geographically proximal peers for redundancy and obfuscation

>using the current and centralized protocols that make these sorts of packet attacks feasible in the first place

>>14869261

>he hasn't played a well-made game in his life

The migration of videogame peering to server-based infrastructure was a matter of convenience and declining developer competency, not an improvement.

>>14869279

>providing customers with the tools to use a product as they see fit is a bad thing

You wouldn't mod a car!

>>14869290

>>14869327

Neither of these is a problem with proper accounting and a heavy stale CRDT standard, however enough devices and users going offline and stripping away all redundant copies would be a problem- if a Norwegian stays up late and plays with a bunch of Americans, many of the Americans will likely be offline and if the net wasn't cast wide enough, he could be locked out of the content he reached the night before.

I have no solution for this except waiting patiently for the omnipresent network, mobile is slowly moving us in a direction where it is possible and seeding/storing will be standard etiquette, or more likely, enforced by manufacturers.

>>14870636

Everything in this post is accurate but I'd like to point out that all three of these games are relatively old and don't take advantage of any of the brand new p2p tech that started seeing development in about 2006 and have gone nuclear since 2016.

>>14870753

>any of the brand new p2p tech

Like what? Don't tell me it's cryptocurrency, as that shit can't work in anything remotely real-time.

Current day vidya P2P is retarded because instead of being actual P2P, because one of the players is the host. Maybe if someone figures out a way to make a true distributed network MMO, like one of those GNU twatter clones, maybe we'd have something to discuss.

>implying p2p MMOs were ever common in any way

>>14870775

CRDT in general has only been around for about 9 years and "public" for fewer, a fuckload of work has gone into making DHT selections smarter and minimizing latency that most games don't bother with, reputation filtering and anti-leech mechanisms that would help make a dominantly p2p system functional, scalability has been a focus of research in China for the past half decade due to their unique telecom circumstances, things like this have already been done and much of it is ready to be utilized. DDS essentially didn't exist in a usable state until 2010. The current popular means also totally ignore advancements in hardware and connection speeds, you get devs trying and failing to carbon-copy Battlenet1.0 decades after it was developed.

Work is going into distributed ledgers like blockchains to slap them around until they're low latency, but it'll take a while to get to that point; even still, shit like IPFS have found ways to make using it reasonably smooth.

>>14870853

But OP wasn't implying that?

If the game is p2p, then there's no central authority to validate the player's actions.

I can teleport across the map, say the other player is in held fixed in position, or whatever else.

I guess if N players were adjacent, you'd need to have connections to all of them, and actions by individuals could be validated by the majority of the clients to which you were connected, but it's easy to imagine situations in which that, too, fails.

Oh, there's also the fact that playing the game will expose your IP to everyone else you connect to, and everyone else's IP to you.

>>14870987

through another host*

P2P is horrible trash compared to Dedicated Servers

it means everyone hosts their own fucking matches, its entirely dependent on random persons connection

>>14870325

In those games the host acts as the server, if he loses connection the game has to stop and find another suitable host from players in the lobby or end the session.

Makes for some interesting gameplay oppurtunities when the host gets migrated to a Nigerian prince on a dialup modem, also piss easy to hack or spy on player IPs if you're the host but hey, at least the poor starving game publisher doesn't have to host anythingbeyond a login server :^)

Decentralized hosting isn't theoretically impossible, but something like IPFS would probably induce a big overhead and tons of lag from syncing+validating everything all the time so you'd have to write a really fucking efficient p2p protocol+netcode or assume every player is on a fibre connection with 0.0000001ms ping.

so if i understand the concept of a peer-to-peer MMO right, NWN1's PW servers are peer-to-peer mini-MMOs?

Your consumer tier routers can't connect to more than 100 peers or so at once, that's just the beginning.

>>14870753

Yeah, you're full of shit and have no idea what you are talking about.

My question is why aren't LAN online RPGs more of a thing?

I know we will never go back to the days of grind at your pace MMOs drop in/out parties. It's all about grinding your character to max level as fast as possible with the best gear to speedrun end game content while min/max your builds (which takes the fun out of sandbox RPGs). And companies exploited that with pay to win/pay to skip models while making the non-pay grind routes virtually unplayable.

>>14871552

*offline

Fuck this phone

>>14871552

Short range rpgs like Diablo played with a small group are the tightest shit. Doesn't have to be LAN as long as it's not a god damn mmo. The closest I've played that resembles this from recent games is Don't Starve Together.

>>14869252

for a playercount n

the server load is one connection for each n, and one update for each n, so n^2

with peer to peer that becomes a per-client load, so each client has to now do what the server did, or n^3

for 16 players or less this is fine. but combinatorics get out of hand quick.

>>14871197

>>14881927

P2P doesn't mean every peer connects to every other peer…

>>14869252

>server multiplayer

1 player, 1 connection

2 players, 2 connections

3 players, 3 connections

500 players, 500 connections

n players, O(n) connections

>peer to peer multiplayer

2 players, 2 connections

3 players, 6 (3*(3-1) connections

4 players, 12 (4*(4-1)connections

500 players, ~ 500*499 connections

n players, O(n*n) connections

it's basic fucking math, you donkey.

>>14881944

>P2P doesn't mean every peer connects to every other peer…

how do the peers decide who is in range of each other to connect, fucking magic? they would all need to talk to some special peer, someone elevated among peers, who has privileged information about all the other peers. i wonder what such a machine would be called