Almost a year later, Multiplayer is still a mess

[Crook]

I doubt that kind of network blending would be feasible to implement in an already released game. The network code isn't going to change for Elite to a server-client model for particular places now - it's too far down the road.

They should have gone for a subscription model to fund ED to do that.

However, I'm all for introducing code that quality tests your own connection and if you're above a certain ping and below a certain bandwidth then you should be denied entry to the open mode for the game. Bring the right tools and you can play, otherwise it's solo.

 

[Jex =TE=]

How is it games like Arma 3 can support over 100 player servers then?

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

imo p2p is fine for some MP games...... whether it is fine for ED is completely subjective of course but for me, and the 3 guys i often play with it is completely fine.

we have not had instancing issues for ages now, aside from a desynicing bug if 1 player drops by hitting a planet gravity well.

even then it mostly still works but wing bonuses for that player stops.

IF I was expecting warthunder or Star Conflict typed MP action maybe i would be disappointed but I was never expecting that from ED.

Maybe it is better for me as i am only down the road from Frontier?

<shugs> YMMV

The main issues i have with ED ARE actually with their servers, and not the P2P part of the game, so with this in mind, with the status quo being as it is now, i would rather distance myself from FDs servers as much as possible thanks

NOTE Just to reiterate I am not saying OP is wrong, just that it is not an issue for me personally. So long as it does not increase the running costs for FD so that content gets cut, or microtransactions or subs are forced, it would not concern me if FD chose to change anything.

 

[Jex =TE=]

Haven't played those, but the little I've read, Planetside's nigh unplayable in mass battles if you don't have a cutting edge gaming rig. So, there's that...

That's not true. I played it on a naff laptop with all the graphics turned down and had no issues at all playing it.

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Great topic.
Here I thought I was the only person who knew the game Joint Operations.

JO was great though I thought it was 150 player servers. Well, JO was great at the start then they seemed to ruin it with every patch.

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Star Citizen ain't even close to coming out, keep waiting and hoping buddy.

Meanwhile, ED is already on it's way to first add-on and No Man's Sky is almost ready to be released.

Also, multiplayer was never ED's focus. Space is.

Yes because ED put in no content so the dev time was quick.

 

[robbyp]

Not the P2P vs C/S again. This thread has been repeated about 100 times in the last year.

C/S is not going to happen (cost/rework). Hopefully the internet will get better for the majority and the problems will lessen.

 

[Colonel Kenney]

All the issues I had with multiplayer I refuse to use it. Its a club for European countries with small geographic areas to keep latency and distance tight. It just doesn't work in the US/Canada. P2P model is a failure and will continue to be in large geographic areas.

So I've spent my time offline to reduce all the issues. Therefore.

 

[Im_Lost]

They need to let players filter matchmaking by regions. E.g. So you don't get players in Europe connecting with those in the US and Asia, that is normally what makes things lag to hell. The only way you can do that right now is use country blocking on your router (if it supports it, not many home ones do), or manually firewall IP ranges....Obviously that is a massive PITA.

The main problem with P2P for gaming is most home connections have quite low upload speeds, that is what limits it. You can have a 200mbit line but if someone only has a 400kb upload that is the bandwidth limit for everyone in the session. Obviously thats not going to handle spikes very well either.

 

[Hawkmoon]

Shame most the posters cannot put as much effort into researching stuff as they do into complaining. Multi player and PVP were never a big part of the original idea for ED it was always going to be mainly PVE, but so many players asked for multi player that DB and FD have done the best that they can. They have always said that there would be a limit to the number of players in an instance and that it would be P 2 P right from the beginning. So why do people have to keep making posts complaining about it, read the tin before you buy and you will not be disappointed. FD have delivered 80-90% of what was originally proposed and delivered it well. I challenge anyone to tell me another game with such complex damage models that can play in real time (no EVE/WoW turn based board games) as smoothly as ED does.

For me the game is the one that I signed up for, sure I would have liked an off line mode but they would have had to have a static background sim to make that work. But you can't have everything, wait until SC and NMS are out and then see if they have managed to do what FD could not and then you can say "Look this is the game I wanted all along" but until then I think ED is a pretty awesome game.

 

[Dingus Maximus]

As the OP mentioned, a huge number of people playing ED will never realize there are any problems.

It's only when you try to play with the same people over and over that it becomes evident. Running through space randomly meeting people, you'll never notice that you can't talk to somebody or you're not seeing the same thing in an instance. But when you try to play with the same wingmates and get "Unable to connect" message you know you're in trouble. It was stated by FD in the dev thread that dedicated co-op missions weren't going to be implemented anytime in the near future. That makes no sense with the addition of wings. On the one hand, they want you to team up. On the other hand, they don't seem to want to provide any in-game incentive to do it. It's pure speculation on my part, but I'm starting to think that it's because they tried it in-house and couldn't make it work reliably. If they released it to the general public in the current state of the game, all it would do would generate complaints from players who see completely different things when in the same instance, let alone trying to sync up mission objectives and payouts.

I really, really hoped CQC was going to force Frontier to acknowledge the shortcomings of their network models. With CQC they are effectively forcing players into the same instance. But look at what they've done... Max 8 ships instead of 32. They've simplified the flight model. All weapons are auto-aim. It's like they knew that their P2P scheme wasn't going to be able to handle it, so they scaled the game back in a big way to keep things from getting out of control.

And if you go look at the CQC forum, it's still a mess. People are unable to see other players. Warping. Lag. Inconsistent performance. Unreliable matchmaking. Some people can't even see anybody in their games. As part of the 1.4 installation instructions, it's mentioned that UPNP must be enabled, but a lot of ISP's don't even support UPNP, or deliberately block it because they think it's a security vulnerability. Yet it's now a requirement? Sure, there's a manual workaround, editing an appconfig file, enabling port forwarding, and opening a port in your firewall... But honestly, how many other games in 2015 need this kind of extra effort to play multiplayer when it's an advertised feature of the game.

And there's the rub. The game requirements make no mention of minimum bandwidth requirements or quality of service. They make no mention of UPNP as a requirement for multiplayer. Yet people can freely play the game without either, and inadvertently degrade the experience of those they connect with. It's been a problem since the Beta launch back in 2014, and unless something changes it will haunt ED well into Horizons...

All of COD games. BF Bad comp 1 and 2 BF 3 and 4. List is endless. Your aware the UPNP is a client side setting and not implemented by the CP or ISP as u will know it.

 

[ZeeWolf]

How is it games like Arma 3 can support over 100 player servers then?

Not all Arma servers do. You need to connect to a really good one and then it's not unusual to see the red connection problem icon. They use an offshoot of that engine for military training so its also intended to work over LAN.

I can't see how it's relevant to ED. You can't really expect Frontier to set up a dedicated server for each system to hold 100 players, or spin up a dedicated server for dynamic instances. How would it work?

 

[Im_Lost]

All of COD games. BF Bad comp 1 and 2 BF 3 and 4. List is endless. Your aware the UPNP is a client side setting and not implemented by the CP or ISP as u will know it.

Yea and you shouldn't use UPNP because it's not secure. Manually set up the forwarding

 

[Esvandiary]

All of COD games. BF Bad comp 1 and 2 BF 3 and 4. List is endless. Your aware the UPNP is a client side setting and not implemented by the CP or ISP as u will know it.

Quite true on UPnP being client-side, but some ISP-provided routers/modems have settings restricted for the end user's "benefit".
Pretty sure BF3 and BF4 at least were client-server, no special requirements there. CoD has tended to have P2P, but they seem to get around client-side networking problems with a lot of TURN relays. FD do this as well, but it seems to be a bit less reliable for many people for whatever reason.

Spend a few days in the Fuel Rats IRC channel, that should be quite enough evidence that instancing problems are very much alive in some cases.

 

[Badben]

well I can't really argue against the OP because honestly I don't understand most of what was said. Anyway, it does sound like you know what you're talking about. These might be good suggestions, I'm just too out of my depth to comment on them. That being said, yes, multiplayer does still have issues, not game destroying ones, especially because I like to fly alone, but I can definitely see how these could be big problems for those who like P2P. Nice to see good constructive ideas posted here on actual issues though, not just whining cause the game isn't how you like it. nice post!

 

[Bran Tse Mallory]

OP, the drum about P2P vs C/S has been banged to death. Even should FD decide they wanted to do it, it would require a massive effort at this stage, and delaying other plans. Not to mention a load of refinement and testing of the changed network code which would leave months of new bugs.

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

Finally, C/S is not the panecea that some people seem to believe. Sure, there are some advantages, including making the game a little harder to hack, but you point to lag as being a problem of P2P, but C/S is also likely to have lag, perhaps worse lag. You want larger instances with a C/S architecture, you're actually asking for lots of lag.

And of course the big one - server costs. Then we start looking at monthly fees. I bought a game that didn't have monthly fees. It was a big selling point for me.

You might as well drop it, the drum has been well and truly banged over the months.

I have to take issue with you on this AA.

You and the other long term players have had since time began to debate these things while those of us who are still quite new to the game have not been a part of these talks. You're post is making me feel like we should just shut up and not talk about the things you already have.

This kind of "Shut up, we've heard it all before!" post is an insult to those of us new players who want to get involved in the community and put our thoughts and ideas forward.

 

[Jex =TE=]

They need to let players filter matchmaking by regions. E.g. So you don't get players in Europe connecting with those in the US and Asia, that is normally what makes things lag to hell. The only way you can do that right now is use country blocking on your router (if it supports it, not many home ones do), or manually firewall IP ranges....Obviously that is a massive PITA.

The main problem with P2P for gaming is most home connections have quite low upload speeds, that is what limits it. You can have a 200mbit line but if someone only has a 400kb upload that is the bandwidth limit for everyone in the session. Obviously thats not going to handle spikes very well either.

I live in the UK, one of my mates is in California and our pings to each other are less than 200ms. Upload speeds have increased massively over here. I'm on 7mb right now, my mate is slightly higher across the pond so no, country blocking - pay for better internet.

 

[Mark Lock]

If you had shown the courtesy of reading on, my point was not that Elite does or doesn't require a permanent connection.
My point was that for example my nephew wasn't able to join any P2P session due to a router issue and was completely unaware of it - and I've heard other people tell me the similar things.

This is not a debate about offline mode, but about online mode.

Which you would know if you finished reading before replying. But sadly, you didn't.

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So Planetside 2 doesn't exist? Eve doesn't exist? These games exist, and actually Eve does something very much like my suggestion. Planetside zone player limit is 800 players, and they did run 1000 player zones before. Even Planetside 1, a game that was launched over a decade ago, supports 200v200v200 on a single map. Joint Operations, a 2004 game, supports 256 players on a single server without any special in-map zoning system or the likes.

Plentside 2 is not as complex as ED, it's just a big shooter with 4 defined maps , Eve Online is closer to ED than PS2 but still it lacks of the indepth and complexity of ED, ships are not as complex, EVE only probably has a more complex market and currently a crafting system, no first person view, weapons are target and click, hit points are handled like in any skill based MMO, there is no ballistic simulation or ships maneuvers required, ships can fight without moving, they require a monthly subscription which explains along with lack of complex simulations why they can let servers handle instances while ED uses P2P to work.

Honestly I never noticed what you talk about and the issues you found, pvp works, interdicting players works nicely and there are tons of ppl around in many sytems and you encounter players in less crowded systems as well.

 

[Kandarus]

Eve Online is closer to ED than PS2 but still it lacks of the indepth and complexity of ED, ships are not as complex, EVE only probably has a more complex market and currently a crafting system, no first person view, weapons are target and click, hit points are handled like in any skill based MMO, there is no ballistic simulation or ships maneuvers required, ships can fight without moving, they require a monthly subscription which explains along with lack of complex simulations why they can let servers handle instances while ED uses P2P to work.

You must be joking ... https://o.smium.org/

 

[Mark Lock]

You must be joking ... https://o.smium.org/

It's not what I mean with complexity, you could have a milion of weapons but in Eve online they just are skill based, they don't have simulated ballistic, you don't have to move around with your ship, it's pretty much static point and click combat, no real time complex simulations going on in that game, I played it for a few years and the complexity of combat and systems is 0, also the game world of Eve is static, there are no complex simulated solar systems, stars or anything, Eve Online universe is not a simulated complex system or orbits and celestial bodies' rotation, it doesn't have physic weapons, ships' systems are a hud of a couple of elements etc...

 

[Lobstris]

Shame most the posters cannot put as much effort into researching stuff as they do into complaining. Multi player and PVP were never a big part of the original idea for ED it was always going to be mainly PVE, but so many players asked for multi player that DB and FD have done the best that they can.

Really? If that was the case, why has so many of the single player aspects of the game been sacrificed on the altar of multiplayer? One of the reasons Elite IV never materialised was consistently given as 'we want it to be multiplayer, and we're waiting for computing hardware and networking to catch up'. From the Kickstarter it was absolutely clear that multiplayer was a primary focus. Ultimately we've ended up with almost worst of both worlds - lack of depth, lack of persistent NPCs, lack of persistency in the universe, and lack of interesting missions due (I believe) in part to having to deal with the multiplayer elements, and an overall poor-to-mediocre multiplayer experience, with rubber banding, general AI weirdness, invisible ships and outright cheating of p2p.
.
If this was any other game apart from Elite...

 

[DanTheMan]

I think you are right. It is a year later. Wing-up's are still sporadic as to whether they work or not.
The maximum number of people in an instance is a pitifully low number,.
The ongoing issues detract from what is an otherwise decent game.

Yes, something should be done.