Dear Frontier: Please Fix Multiplayer

Nim Rodel · May 7, 2015

Don't get me wrong I really enjoy watching ships rubber-band around and sometimes disappear entirely but honestly in the long run I would like something a little more playable.

So if you could bump this up a notch or two on your list-o-priorities that would be just super.

Thanks.

Nim Rodel

fergal · May 7, 2015

Rubberbanding happens when you and another player in your instance have a poor connection.

If this happens occasionally its probably on the other players end, if this happens to you all the time, its your problem.

You might just be playing at a time where there are many players on the other side of the world also playing.
Not much you can do to improve your ping over large distances.

kurush · May 7, 2015

fergal said:
You might just be playing at a time where there are many players on the other side of the world also playing.
Not much you can do to improve your ping over large distances.

You can check that you have a decent router and may be even configure it for port forwarding. In my experience it improved the connection quality, although your mileage may vary obviously.

Nim Rodel · May 7, 2015

I honestly don't think it will make a difference, but which port(s) would I be forwarding?

Nim Rodel

Tiamat · May 7, 2015

You can choose the port but most go for 5100.

https://support.elitedangerous.com/kb/faq.php?id=33

You may have to add the two lines below.

upnpenabled="0"
Port="5100"

This might help if you don't know how to forward ports on your router.
http://portforward.com/help/elite-dangerous/

dominathan · May 7, 2015

kurush said:
You can check that you have a decent router and may be even configure it for port forwarding. In my experience it improved the connection quality, although your mileage may vary obviously.

I have 100/100Mbps and I get it all of the time. But I play late in PDT, so it's mostly other countries. I've heard it's peer to peer; is that true?

{SAS}Stalker · May 7, 2015

dominathan said:
I've heard it's peer to peer; is that true?

yes its P2P

Ancipital · May 7, 2015

dominathan said:
I have 100/100Mbps and I get it all of the time. But I play late in PDT, so it's mostly other countries. I've heard it's peer to peer; is that true?

Yep, so if the instance is hosted by someone on ADSL, with less than a megabit upstream and other household members using the connection, plus there are a bunch of players in the instance, it will basically be hell on wheels. Don't expect the multiplayer to be consistent or even good while it's still p2p.

Nim Rodel · May 7, 2015

Ancipital said:
Yep, so if the instance is hosted by someone on ADSL, with less than a megabit upstream and other household members using the connection, plus there are a bunch of players in the instance, it will basically be hell on wheels. Don't expect the multiplayer to be consistent or even good while it's still p2p.

I would not hesitate to pay a subscription for this game if they transitioned over to a server-side instance hosting scheme. But I can only speak for myself in that respect.

An instance accepts new connects so long as a Quality value does not drop below 70% or so long as the total number of players in the instance is below 32. But in testing they found that the Q-value was almost always the deciding factor.

Given what I know about networking I'm afraid I'm going to have to agree with you. As long as this game depends on P2P client side hosting of instances the multiplayer is going to be a mess.

And I realize that for a lot of people this is a non-issue. SOLO and PVT players don't care about this, and I get that. But I do care, and I'm pretty sure I'm not alone.

Nim

Ancipital · May 7, 2015

Nim Rodel said:
I would not hesitate to pay a subscription for this game if they transitioned over to a server-side instance hosting scheme. But I can only speak for myself in that respect.

(Middle bit snipped)

And I realize that for a lot of people this is a non-issue. SOLO and PVT players don't care about this, and I get that. But I do care, and I'm pretty sure I'm not alone.

No, you're not alone. I'd pay too- but I do fear that the subscription model is moribund, if not actually dead, in the era of b2p and f2p. I liked paying an upfront subscription for things like (and yes, I'm going to say it) WoW. If you paid for six months at a time, it was incredibly cheap- comparable to a night at the pub- not even an evening in a nice restaurant. However, that ship, I fear, has sailed.

..and yes, there's a reason why p2p networking is always seen as a second rate option; it's always horrible, unstable and unreliable- at least as a way to do fast realtime stuff with multiple clients.

Personally, I mostly play solo- and the ropey networking is a major contributing factor there. In solo mode, without the networking woes, it's a magnificent game- which is a bit of a tease.

kurush · May 7, 2015

Ancipital said:
..and yes, there's a reason why p2p networking is always seen as a second rate option; it's always horrible, unstable and unreliable- at least as a way to do fast realtime stuff with multiple clients.

Personally, I mostly play solo- and the ropey networking is a major contributing factor there. In solo mode, without the networking woes, it's a magnificent game- which is a bit of a tease.

When SWTOR implemented space fighter combat, it ended up having all the same issues including rubber-banding and ships jumping around and it is server-based. You guys really need to look into your networking hardware if you experience this type of issues. Also, I don't think there is such thing as one player hosting an instance in ED. The instance is in fact shared and the guy with crappy ADSL will only affect himself and, possibly, some objects managed by his PC. So, if you see this issue just for some players - those are likely the people with bad connections. Same people who are coming here on a regular basis to whine about P2P

If you see this effect for everybody, you are one of these people. Go shopping for a new ISP and/or router

Ancipital · May 7, 2015

kurush said:
When SWTOR implemented space fighter combat, it ended up having all the same issues including rubber-banding and ships jumping around and it is server-based. You guys really need to look into your networking hardware if you experience this type of issues. Also, I don't think there is such thing as one player hosting an instance in ED. The instance is in fact shared and the guy with crappy ADSL will only affect himself and, possibly, some objects managed by his PC. So, if you see this issue just for some players - those are likely the people with bad connections. Same people who are coming here on a regular basis to whine about P2P If you see this effect for everybody, you are one of these people. Go shopping for a new ISP and/or router

I am delighted that your ISP defies both the laws of physics and the Shannon limits. Sadly, I am limited to only being able to shop in reality for my connectivity, more fool me.

kryss · May 7, 2015

I think this is lag, it colours every aspect of the game - I'm finding that when exploring, the data for the advanced scanner sometimes lags so badly your in the next system when it comes up. I also find that when I target NPC's in populated systems they start and stop - presumably as their positional data and speed is shared with FD.

And lately I've noticed its got worse, coincidentally with more players being about.

Rall · May 7, 2015

Ancipital said:
No, you're not alone. I'd pay too- but I do fear that the subscription model is moribund, if not actually dead, in the era of b2p and f2p. I liked paying an upfront subscription for things like (and yes, I'm going to say it) WoW. If you paid for six months at a time, it was incredibly cheap- comparable to a night at the pub- not even an evening in a nice restaurant. However, that ship, I fear, has sailed.

..and yes, there's a reason why p2p networking is always seen as a second rate option; it's always horrible, unstable and unreliable- at least as a way to do fast realtime stuff with multiple clients.

Personally, I mostly play solo- and the ropey networking is a major contributing factor there. In solo mode, without the networking woes, it's a magnificent game- which is a bit of a tease.

Both methods have pro and cons, neither is necessarily superior.

In my case client/server is almost always worse, as even with the most popular games with 20million+ players, the closest server is 2000km away in Sydney. A get all the symptoms you describe and more when connecting to dedicated servers.

Games with a player base to justify Australian servers are rare, most of the time I'm forced to use US east cost servers - a 10,000km round trip, which is a 200ms latency at the best of times.

P2P is almost always better for me for real-time games, as it will favour match making me with players in Australasia or South East Asia.

cryon1cang3l · May 7, 2015

For people live close to the server, the p2p system is crap. I could get a 20ms ping to UK, even less in Germany. Right now i got lags, this happens pretty rare, but i can see why, specially while playing with russian friends - they are far away and this is bad. Because if he got lags, other people would play like usual... But not with p2p, if he is lagging the whole instance is going crazy. Remove the p2p-part, host servers in regions and be happy with 100ms maximum ping.

GhengisSean · May 7, 2015

Just posting in agreement with Nim Rodel. I would gladly play a subscription fee if it enhanced gameplay. I feel like this game was made for me. Always loving the idea of improvements

kurush · May 7, 2015

Ancipital said:
I am delighted that your ISP defies both the laws of physics and the Shannon limits. Sadly, I am limited to only being able to shop in reality for my connectivity, more fool me.

Nah, my ISP is just regular cable. And it works totally fine with most players while for some players I see the issues I described. You also have to answer the question: how adding a server to the equation would fix your connectivity issues? Especially considering that the game tries to match you with the people local to you instead of routing everything through UK.

Nim Rodel · May 8, 2015

kurush said:
Nah, my ISP is just regular cable. And it works totally fine with most players while for some players I see the issues I described. You also have to answer the question: how adding a server to the equation would fix your connectivity issues? Especially considering that the game tries to match you with the people local to you instead of routing everything through UK.

I believe that what you'll find is that you need to answer this question: why don't more games use P2P networking.

If you look at the pros and cons for P2P practically the only thing it has going for it is that it is cheap.

Here's what really scares me. It looks like ED lets each client decide things like its position and its health. So it may be that every client is sending this information to every other client in the network. This makes cheating incredibly easy. Additionally, if someone with a bad connection joins the network every other client has to interpolate the laggy-clients position and then every once in a while the laggy-client says "oh no I'm actually over here", and now we're in rubber band town.

I'm not going to claim to be an expert, but I have worked on multiplayer game networking (Unity) before so I am not clueless either.

The fact that the P2P works for small groups of people with good connections who are geographically close to one-another is not terribly helpful.

If you'd like to learn more look into things like Authoritative servers, client-server synchronization, Object interpolation, etc.

Nim

kurush · May 8, 2015

Nim Rodel said:
If you'd like to learn more look into things like Authoritative servers, client-server synchronization, Object interpolation, etc.

Nim

Better look into your own networking. A lot of theory here from the people who can't even set up their home network properly. I saw how a similar game mechanics works in client-server architecture and it is about the same for people with bad connections.

Nim Rodel · May 8, 2015

kurush said:
Better look into your own networking. A lot of theory here from the people who can't even set up their home network properly. I saw how a similar game mechanics works in client-server architecture and it is about the same for people with bad connections.

The people with bad connections have a bad time but everyone else has a good time, as opposed to everyone having a bad time. Thanks for being hostile about it though.

Nim