The year is 2020 and Elite Dangerous is still P2P. Let's discuss PvE and PvP servers.
- Thread starter Sir Ganksalot
- Start date
In truth I think I'd dread being given the task of presenting new marketing blurb for the game, particularly if it was supposed to be representative of current gameplay.
I do look forward to discovering the content of Odyssey - and then reading how Marketing presents it
I do look forward to discovering the content of Odyssey - and then reading how Marketing presents it
Just a quick question, has anyone gone through a pcap file recently to analyse what elite is actually doing on the network? (last forum post about the subject was circa 2017). What I am wondering about (and being lazy <wireshark>) do CMDR's create a unique connection with every other CMDR in the instance, or is a single CMDR designated the main server and everyone else connects to them?
Too inclusive... needs to be a bit more 'edgelord'...
I would pay subscription for that game, but i would probably be the exception.
The truth is what we have now was the thing kickstarter backers voted for - a multiplayer game with no subscription and no ingame microtransactions.
How many Arx does it cost to sign up?
Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
It wasn't so much the case that the Kickstarter backers voted for or against specific features, more that they had the option to back, or not, the game as detailed in the design information published at the start of the pitch.
They did in fact have one forum vote asking the community if "cosmetic items" to support the continued development and running costs of the game were acceptable, the result was positive though I can't recall what the options were.
Incidently the original Kickstarter has an FAQ section that had a sentance describing the "peer to peer" networking
Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
Indeed - there was one about a year after the KS pitch started.
It's in the "How does multiplayer work" answer:
P2P for instancing makes far more sense than dedicated servers. Gaming machines these days are powerful enough to act as servers for numbers of people, and for a game as vast as E: D servers running anything other than the BGS make little sense. Most of the time they'd be running empty instances. It's much better not to have to pay to run servers, for players and FD.
P2P seems to be confused with PVP and PVE, when actually it is utterly irrelevant.
P2P seems to be confused with PVP and PVE, when actually it is utterly irrelevant.
I wonder what its population would be like if it (a) wasn't fragmented into as many subgroups as it is, and (b) was right there on the menu instead of having to hear about it on the forums or reddit.
Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
I strongly suspect that a significant number of the fragments of the PvE-player-base would coalsece, at least some of the time, into a new PvE game mode if it were made available. Some players who currently compromise between their wish to play among other players and their wish to avoid PvP may also choose to play in such a mode.
Noting that there are those vehemently opposed to the principle of a PvE game mode as it may reduce the number of players that they would encounter in Open.
As is obvious by current threads wishing to 'entice' players into open
I believe the PvP contingent are well aware that if a PvE option was offered then 'open' as it is today might be considerably less crowded, losing pirates their 'marks' and the 'organic PvP players who prefer weaker opponents' their playmates.
Imagine how sweet Bitcoins would be if they used dedicated servers though? It would fix everything, cryptocurrencies are sooo cheap using distributed systems and everything when they could just be "fixed" using dedicated servers and join 2020
With no solo server you are forcing console players to use a premium account which is unfair, who would want to be paying extra for the chance of encountering any of the rest of us.
I, for one, wouldn't even have known that Mobius existed if it hadn't been for these forums. For me, personally, it worked fine as a transition between lonely Solo and the wild and rambunctious Open. Even if PvE/Open had been an option, I honestly can't say that I would have stayed in it, I just don't understand why it's not even an option.
Not that different to what they do now, but focus much more on the inter-player cooperation (which works reasonably well) than on the conflict, and really play up the scale and pretty landscapes side of it.Agreed. But let's have a competition here - just for fun - and everyone shows his preferred marketing speech that a) correctly and in a non-deceiving way describes what the game has to offer and b) is still attractive enough for new potential users. I'm very curious with what ideas you'll come up here...
Never the less, your slow connection or the poor connections of others are not simply "fixed" by connecting to a dedicated server somewhere, you are still just slow consumer networks connecting to a cloud instance or a local dedicated on-prem. Just that the host could in theory be somewhat more stable for some cases.
It doesn't answer the question of scale or the practicallity of providing these stable servers for infinite instances without seriously re-designing the game.
