Almost a year later, Multiplayer is still a mess

[Azamo]

SC is going to use the same system as elite... and sins SC (if you read its goals , its the same as elite but with a smaller universe and no seamless planets)is just a smaller game with a smaller scope but with nicer graphics I dont take anything from RSI seriously.
the only thing I like about SC is the seamless in and out of ships. everything else is less good... I mean landing on planets will be a load screen and towns will be hubs just the same as say X:rebirth , expect rebirth had a small budget

No, SC is not going to be using the same system. Its going to be server based.

 

[Maruun]

If you played Eve as static point and click you were doing it wrong. Using traversal velocity was key to mitigating damage while damaging. Sometimes it was best to joust if your weapon tracking was slower than your opponent but you were faster. And, there was always stasis webbifiers as well as warp inhibitors and all sorts of EM you had to know how to deal with. Complex.

And as to the universe. ED is procedurally generated but empty. Eve's galaxy may be static but the territories are dynamic because of player groups goals, war or diplomacy.

Doesnt change the fact that nothing of it was simulated...just a bunch off dices being thrown, its the same indirect combat that most mmos use. Working with percentages and hit chances as well as crit chances ect.
Thats why its possible to have those huge battle in EVE with a giant slowdown for the "simulation" to get the dices rolling with you just waiting for your result, reacting to it and rolling the dice again.
PING isnt a issue in such a indirect gameplay.

Planetside 2 has its own problems, most of its hitdetection is client side...meaning when your computer says you hit something the server accepts it. Pretty hilarious the hacks some people used...there were guys that kileld everything through walls while shooting in the air because the bullets "hit" the targets in a giant area. Not to mention the invisible enemys that can kill you because the server had so many people in a small area that you couldnt see any player further then 5m... So many work arounds in that game to make it "possible" to have so many players around. Some pretty bad stuff for a shooter...well its some time i last played it.

Many shooters have a prediction-system for movements in order to compensate pings. Its those situations you experience where you thought you shoot first but didnt kill him but pumped all your magazine in him, but you still died first.
Running around the corner and being dead in less then a second and it wasnt a headshot or something like that.

P2P has its own weaknesses but there is no better system. If you want a better Networking...invent lightspeed internet connection, then all our problems regarding that will be gone.

 

[Toumal]

As I noted: On top of that, it works "good enough" for most people for most of the time. There is little incentive to actually change.

Only if you're ok with having as little as 10-15 commanders at any given location. Only if you're ok with people going "ok I'm here! Oh wait, I can't see you. Damn instances again".

And as i also mentioned: Server costs - are you willing to pay a subscription fee?

Elite already requires servers. Without them, there would be no matchmaking, no landing pad assignments, no missions, no background simulation, no powerplay. You can't tell me that hosting about a dozen more VMs for the currently active community goals and warzones is going to suddenly require all hundreds of thousands of Elite owners to cough up a subscription fee. Or to be more direct: if you believe that, then you are simply incorrect

And as i also mentioned: C/S brings its own problems. Effectively swapping one set of problems for another.

Not really. C/S is not feasible for hosting ALL instances, and that's about it as far as drawbacks are concerned. The only other drawback is that if a server is located far away from players, they would all have a bad gaming experience. But that is easily prevented with AWS because you can pretty much ensure that there's servers for the US, EU and Asia. Plus if a player with a bad connection hops in, only that player has a bad experience, everyone else will be fine. In P2P, such a scenario basically ruins the whole instance and may even lead to people being kicked out.


I completely understand your scepticism, and it's tempting to think that there's some big drawback lurking in the shadows - but there isn't one. I've given you all the downsides, and they are the reason why I don't think P2P should be abandoned. The game isn't completely borked - but it's multiplayer is indeed hampered by the limitations of P2P. We have the technology. We can make it better than it was. Better. Stronger. Faster. Oh wait that was a different TV show.

 

[Toumal]

Planetside 2 has its own problems, most of its hitdetection is client side...meaning when your computer says you hit something the server accepts it.

That is true! However, first of all you don't have to do clientside hit detection. Especially if the amount of projectiles per time is low, and/or the player entity can't rapidly change direction or speed. Planetside the cards stacked against it there.
Second, even with clientside hit detection you can still do serverside sanity checks. For example, if a client sends hits, you can check that he doesn't exceed the firing rate of his weapon, or that he's even able to have LOS to his target, or that he doesn't hit 20 different targets spread out far apart in short succession.

Many shooters have a prediction-system for movements in order to compensate pings. Its those situations you experience where you thought you shoot first but didnt kill him but pumped all your magazine in him, but you still died first.
Running around the corner and being dead in less then a second and it wasnt a headshot or something like that.

The need for prediction is not tied to any particular networking architecture. Also, what you described is an mostly effect of client side hit detection, not prediction - although prediction can exacerbate the issue. Then there's interpolation which Elite does too, you can see it in action in unhealthy instances, when ships jump around every second. They keep moving between updates based on their previous speed. Essentially, it's prediction, rendered visibly over multiple frames.

So yeah, Elite does that too and it's P2P. Another example: Space Beast Terror Fright, a pure P2P game (and very fun!). They too have to do prediction. They too have the same issues: Low player numbers (though that is ok considering their game premise), and consistency issues. Plus they can't support partition tolerance (i.e. people leaving the game) but that's basically a lack of understanding on the developer's part.

P2P has its own weaknesses but there is no better system. If you want a better Networking...invent lightspeed internet connection, then all our problems regarding that will be gone.

Not so. P2P simply doesn't scale. Even in a LAN you hit bandwidth limits pretty quickly. The amount of bandwidth required raises exponentially with each added peer. And while with C/S the bandwidth-over-players curve is also not exactly linear, it is far, far less steep. And yes, that difference is huge.

 

[resonic]

Whats even worse is the fact that FDEV stil hasnt figured out how to use IPV6. I mean hey who could have thought about this, right? IPV6 arrived just over night without being even announced for more than ten years or so

Come on FDEV! There are thousands of players out there with IPV6/IPV4 dual stack lite connections who cant see their friends online, see stuff disappear, cant totally participate in real multiplayer gaming because YOU not supporting current network technology at all! What the hell is wrong with your network developers? Simply: If they are not able to work with IPV6: FIRE THEM!

 

[Esvandiary]

Elite already requires servers. Without them, there would be no matchmaking, no landing pad assignments, no missions, no background simulation, no powerplay. You can't tell me that hosting about a dozen more VMs for the currently active community goals and warzones is going to suddenly require all hundreds of thousands of Elite owners to cough up a subscription fee. Or to be more direct: if you believe that, then you are simply incorrect

It mostly already requires several web services. You'd need rather beefier hardware to reliably run realtime server instances. You'd probably not need that many of them with your suggestion, of course (except you arguably need to replicate it per-region to prevent excessive latency...)

I completely understand your scepticism, and it's tempting to think that there's some big drawback lurking in the shadows - but there isn't one. I've given you all the downsides,

... other than the downside of having to ensure that the game can transparently work with P2P instances and C/S instances, and that the client behaves correctly in both cases. Far from trivial.

I like the idea and definitely think it would significantly benefit the game, but blindly stating things as fact doesn't help your cause. We can take a good guess at how much things might cost, or what impact it might have; but unless you're a fly on the wall at Frontier, we can't know for sure.

 

[Toumal]

... other than the downside of having to ensure that the game can transparently work with P2P instances and C/S instances, and that the client behaves correctly in both cases. Far from trivial.

I like the idea and definitely think it would significantly benefit the game, but blindly stating things as fact doesn't help your cause. We can take a good guess at how much things might cost, or what impact it might have; but unless you're a fly on the wall at Frontier, we can't know for sure.

Look, I do this thing for a living and have . I can assure you I don't just "blindly state things". And while it's not a trivial task, it's also not rocket science. It's certainly a LOT easier than getting P2P to work as well as Frontier did.

 

[burzum]

Stopped reading when I got to the part where you said 'mostly-offline game' in reference to a game that requires an internet connection to play; I assume this level of accuracy and objective assessment is the bar for the rest of the text and therefore not interested.. Thank you for playing. NEXT!

It mostly requires the connection for the so called "evolving" universe and ongoing story. Two things I don't really notice in the game (all the same boring grind, with our without story) nor something that adds a lot to the actual gameplay mechanics itself.

IMHO they've put it in as a way to prevent people from copying the game for free or they really had that intention of an "evolving" and "living" galaxy but totally failed on that so far.

Look at Skyrim, look at the Witcher series. Modable games and good games sell even without DRM and always online crap. Give us Elite Offline + Modding!

 

[Esvandiary]

Look, I do this thing for a living and have . I can assure you I don't just "blindly state things". And while it's not a trivial task, it's also not rocket science. It's certainly a LOT easier than getting P2P to work as well as Frontier did.

Except that as has been discussed, they'd have had to do that anyway because they didn't (and likely still don't) have the funds to make it a fully C/S game even if they'd wanted to.

The reason I dislike you stating things as fact is that unless you've done this for a living at Frontier and have detailed knowledge of the network architecture of this game (beyond the high-level that we can work out from game behaviour and logs), you can't actually know how tricky it would be. We can guess, we can say "probably" based on other experience and that's fine; but for all we know there's some limitation we can't see that would greatly increase the engineering effort needed.

As I said before: I think it'd be great if one day ED could support C/S in some areas, allowing for larger player numbers at CGs, warzones etc. I'd love to turn up to a Coriolis starport and hear "docking permission denied" due to no pads available. But ultimately it's a cost/benefit thing for Frontier, and clearly their view of that is a bit different to ours.

 

[CMDR Cillian Raynor]

normally play this solo. Played in wing with my brother the past few days.


I like how this game has almost ZERO incentives for you to play as a team. Shared missions goals? nope. You can get missions that task you with killing the same skimmers form the same faction, but if i kill one, my brother doesnt get the kill or vice versa. so it's pretty much look for them separately.Im gonna assume it works the same for say, missions in which you have to source certain materials, i bet it wont matter if we're in a wing and i return it, he'll still have to go get some too

Travelling together is a pain (why when as a wing cant i just set a waypoint and my wingmate would get a waypoint to the same destination, i understand his route might be different because of ships jump ranges but so what, as long as our final destination is the same) AND half the time anyway either one of us couldnt' see the other's ship or srv.


as a mmo this game is a gigantic mess. I'm sorry to say it this way but it's a game designed as a mmo by people who, at least for now, don't know how to make mmos. Most days i dont care because i'm solo only, but if i ever recommended this game to anyone, i'd caution them that we likely won't be playing together much (cause why? it will either slow both of us down or at least won't make things any quicker) and that if they're into PVP, outside of Cqc they might not get their fix.

 

[MyThos]

Look, I do this thing for a living and have . I can assure you I don't just "blindly state things". And while it's not a trivial task, it's also not rocket science. It's certainly a LOT easier than getting P2P to work as well as Frontier did.

I think Frontier decided for P2P for two reasons: server costs and the fact that apart from the core bubble there will not be very many players joining your island. So it would be interesting if some kind of mixed mode could be achieved - if islands need to be shared due to multiple players in same system/area, resort to a C/S managed instancing, otherwise fallback to server-friendly P2P approach. And finally introduce a server management to move the slider between both variants based on player count, etc.

But of course this would introduce more development challenges ...