The joy of instancing - An finally an awesome battle

[Nerwan]

I'm not sure how many people were aware of it but there was quite a shin-dig last night down in the Paras system
with around 8 of the player groups all fighting each other, some coming in on the side of the Achenar Immortals and some coming to the aid of the United German Commanders. AA took 3 wings of small ships down from Eravate to assist the UGC and the night culminated in a pretty large battle with the largest number of commanders in one fight that I've seen in some time. (Harry Potter I can't believe you escaped you slippery thing, I so thought I had you )


Anyway, despite this being quite the PVP success in the end, I just thought it might be interesting to give a little account of what it's like getting into a battle like this. I know PVPers are always whining about instancing but here's what it's like:


7:00 - AA members are all pumped, people are coming on-line and we're all talking about what ships we going to take down and which wings.
7:10 - Our first members, with the longest jump range ships, are starting to arrive in Paras (170LY from our system) checking out who's around from the enemy commanders groups etc..
7:20 - We now have 3 wings in system and are making contact with allies, discussing escape systems and working out staging areas etc..
7:30 - We make a united jump into Paras check out who's there.. nobody, just us.. Various of our members have enemy commanders in their friends lists so we check to see, the enemies are all supposed to be here..
8:00 - We try all our usual tricks to get into the right instance.. we all drop into normal space, one of us goes into super cruise, we undo all our wings, we all restart our clients, we all jump out the system and one jumps back.
8:30 - One of us manages to get in the right instance with enemy commanders, he's interdicted by them but the rest of us can't get into the right instance so he Hi-Wakes.
8:40 - One of the enemy commanders ends up in our instance, we interdict him, but he has no support so he hi-wakes.
9:00 - We see a few of the enemcy commanders and interdict them - There two of them and they start fighting, we don't have all our players in the right instance yet so it's a 2v2 to begin with.
9:30 - Now that the fight has begun, lots of commanders can be anchored in, more and more come into the instance on each side of the battle. At any given point there's now 20-30 commanders fighting which gives the critical mass that means players can die/leave through injury and come back to find the fight is still going on.


10PM onwards.. fun times had by all..


My message to FDev - We love the engineers updates etc (mostly) but please.. pretty please.. do something about instancing, 2 hours to get a fight going is a real downer and some people end up getting discouraged and leaving before it begins.


P.s. Thanks to all the commanders who fought last night, I sallute you all, even the salty ones

 

[kofeyh]

Basically until you have enough commanders acting as bridges, the matchmaking system will actually be fighting against you. It's hard to balance being able to wing up with anyone and also have the system fail due to latency being so much the mechanics become unworkable.

The matchmaking system has gotten so religious over who can wing with whom, I actually have to use a US based VPN, so that I can wing up with yanks. The wierd thing is over VPN it's darned near flawless, so it can't just be latency alone that's affecting wings and instancing.

Frontier almost need to have P2P hubs where there are servers that act like players in multiple regions, to act as those bridges.

It sounds like it was an awesome evening all the same. When it works, matchmaking is quite something. I just wish it worked more than it didn't.

 

[Whiterose]

We got over 100 in the same instance in DW at SagA*. It does take a lot of planning but the simplest is to use the same wing, invite and then drop someone once they have arrived, rinse and repeat, and use those in the instance to set up their own wings.

 

[Nerwan]

We got over 100 in the same instance in DW at SagA*. It does take a lot of planning but the simplest is to use the same wing, invite and then drop someone once they have arrived, rinse and repeat, and use those in the instance to set up their own wings.

Yep, and that's exactly what happened. However, doing that while someone is firing 5 rail guns at you is a little different than doing it while exploring I just wish it worked a bit better to begin with.

 

[Whiterose]

Yep, and that's exactly what happened. However, doing that while someone is firing 5 rail guns at you is a little different than doing it while exploring I just wish it worked a bit better to begin with.

lol, yes, it could be improved. Even while exploring it was dangerous, people came out of supercruise and forgot to move, and got hit by the next ships coming out of SC. Schoolboy error.

 

[Aewarin Jameson]

I just wish it worked a bit better to begin with.

Depends really where the problem is.

Was everyone using port-forwarding and fixed ports or were you using uPnP ? (which I believe is part of the issue ED has, coupled with buggy code of course)

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We got over 100 in the same instance in DW at SagA*

Weren't there some screenshots of that some time ago (newsletter maybe?) as I remember thinking it was an impressive accomplishment.

 

[anikaiful]

Yep, and that's exactly what happened. However, doing that while someone is firing 5 rail guns at you is a little different than doing it while exploring I just wish it worked a bit better to begin with.

Would be sort of nice if they did something like: wing beacons usable by everyone. A beacon flares up for everyone in the same system (server knows where people are anyway, at least which system/planet/etc they're on). Follow the global beacon and violá, in correct instance with people... Could work, in theory at least - just a quick thought however.

 

[Nerwan]

Would be sort of nice if they did something like: wing beacons usable by everyone. A beacon flares up for everyone in the same system (server knows where people are anyway, at least which system/planet/etc they're on). Follow the global beacon and violá, in correct instance with people... Could work, in theory at least - just a quick thought however.

That would be totally awesome.. if instead of creating a wing beacon you could create some kind of global rally beacon which was completely public..

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Depends really where the problem is.

Was everyone using port-forwarding and fixed ports or were you using uPnP ? (which I believe is part of the issue ED has, coupled with buggy code of course)

It would have been a mix I suspect, it's not like we're all part of the same organisation.. so it's not easy to propogate these sort of things round to every member of every group that might be taking part.. It's kind of annoying that just in order to play the game you have to understand the architecture of the game and get everyone to alter things on their router etc... but it is what it is I guess. Having said this, I'm not convinced that this really is the problem. After all we did eventually all get into the right instance, so if it was really a networking problem wouldn't that have been impossible?

 

[ErichZann]

Depends really where the problem is.

Was everyone using port-forwarding and fixed ports or were you using uPnP ? (which I believe is part of the issue ED has, coupled with buggy code of course)

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Weren't there some screenshots of that some time ago (newsletter maybe?) as I remember thinking it was an impressive accomplishment.

Well, if I am alone I see lots of people using upnp, if I use manual port forwarding I often see none.

 

[Aewarin Jameson]

After all we did eventually all get into the right instance, so if it was really a networking problem wouldn't that have been impossible?

Not wanting to hijack your thread, but networking issues could still be part of the problem. For P2P to work you have to open a port on your firewall and allow return traffic. If you initiate the connection then there isn't a problem; it's more to do with others trying to connect to you. You will always be able to get online as you start the conversation with the servers, but I agree though that asking for a degree in networking shouldn't be a requirement to play the game, but FD are not doing anything to help here. (Where's the TEST button in the options ?!!) Then again .. a lot of these issues could be down to the underlying code. <shrug>

At least you got there in the end.

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Well, if I am alone I see lots of people using upnp, if I use manual port forwarding I often see none.

With all due respect you could be doing it wrong. I have no choice - Commercial firewall that doesn't support uPnP

 

[maak]

What a brillant idea.
+1 rep

Would be sort of nice if they did something like: wing beacons usable by everyone. A beacon flares up for everyone in the same system (server knows where people are anyway, at least which system/planet/etc they're on). Follow the global beacon and violá, in correct instance with people... Could work, in theory at least - just a quick thought however.

 

[kofeyh]

Not wanting to hijack your thread, but networking issues could still be part of the problem. For P2P to work you have to open a port on your firewall and allow return traffic. If you initiate the connection then there isn't a problem; it's more to do with others trying to connect to you. You will always be able to get online as you start the conversation with the servers, but I agree though that asking for a degree in networking shouldn't be a requirement to play the game, but FD are not doing anything to help here. (Where's the TEST button in the options ?!!) Then again .. a lot of these issues could be down to the underlying code. <shrug>

At least you got there in the end.

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With all due respect you could be doing it wrong. I have no choice - Commercial firewall that doesn't support uPnP

Unfortunately uPNP isn't the smoking gun. I have it set to uPNP and yet I can connect via a VPN (which means there is nothing to set a uPNP rule against) and I can wing up with anyone in the US.

If I drop the VPN, matchmaking doesn't care whether I use NAT, or uPNP, it simply will not allow a wing formation. I either don't see commanders at all. Or their wing signal moving around.

Thus, to wing up, it means you effectively need to have enough "bridge" commanders (ie CMDR 1, can see 2 and 3, but 2 and 3 cannot see each other directly) in a session to hit critical mass and everyone is able to more or less see everyone else.

The matchmaking code just needs more work. If a VPN connection that drops me into the US effectively solves the problem, there's something else going on. I tend to think this is more likely that frontier have tried to address complaints about lag in wing formations, by making the p2p negotiation more stringent on latency and or location. If it's simply checking latency between source and destination public IPs, then as soon as I use the VPN connection, my public address is now stateside, so latency is immediately significantly less between the two public IPs.

The last bug forum post I saw, frontier were suggesting it was potentially an ISP problem, so I don't think they even assume it's a valid issue to investigate.

 

[Nerwan]

Not wanting to hijack your thread, but networking issues could still be part of the problem. For P2P to work you have to open a port on your firewall and allow return traffic. If you initiate the connection then there isn't a problem; it's more to do with others trying to connect to you. You will always be able to get online as you start the conversation with the servers, but I agree though that asking for a degree in networking shouldn't be a requirement to play the game, but FD are not doing anything to help here.

This is possible.. but consider this.. As I understand it, in order for me to fire on someone and them take damage I must at that point have set up a two way UDP connection with them. So if it's possible at that point, why isn't it possible when initially forming the instance? And of course even if you're right, it only takes one player to have an incorrect set-up to create a split instance, and having everyone review their router setting prior to a fight just isn't realistic. I'm actually not convinced that split instancing is related to P2P networking problems at all. I suspect the server is responsible for creating instances (and the related NPCs etc) even if seeing people in those instances is a P2P thing so I think the server must be deciding to create new instances more frequently than it should be..