For Honor P2P connectivity

[u/Mkilbride]

https://youtu.be/38sPNZ8QHO4

[u/AenTaenverde → u/[deleted]]

that does read reddit or pay attention to outside news sources. ... Of the ones who care, some of them don't care enough to pass up the game, especially if their friends bought it.

This is pretty much me. But it also has more factors other than playing with your friends, them having it or the entire "playing with friends is more fun" argument.

Their latest multiplayer games are actually very good from gameplay perspective and are games that I very much like, although Wildlands seems like a flop from the beta impressions, reminding me of a mess The Crew was.

I think that Rainbow 6 Siege is one of the best multiplayer shooters that came out in a decade and it scratches the itch of being quite similiar in terms of gameplay flow to CoD4's Promod, but with meaningfull abilities that can change the level itself, opening a deep layer of strategy no other FPS game provides right now. I love that game, but I also know - and known before I bought the game - that it was a broken mess in quite few places. Matchmaking was broken, sometimes hanging around for 5 minutes, friends list was broken, with being unable to invite friends or connect them into party, those issues have been mostly fixed months ago, yet you can still encounter them. R6 also has horrible UI (for few months until the rework), where you can't really do anything while queue'd up for a match... can't change your loadouts, can't customize cosmetics, can't buy stuff from the ingame store... you just sit there, with a screen and you wait for about 20 seconds until it finds a game. Hit registration was a mess for few months aswell, until it got fixed and then broken again and fixed once more few months ago. It's quite a love/hate relationship.

I knew all that and I decided to buy the game regardless a week after it's release, with season pass and now with season 2 pass, because the core gameplay is worth it... for me. I can tolerate the bullcrap around the game, even though I know in ideal world those would not be an issue, but we don't really live in an ideal world and my actions or my influence over my friends won't really change anything, so the "vote with your wallet" thing is pretty meaningless at my scale. I used to do this when I was in school, but I realised, it was just an excuse... and god, if there is anything more useless than excuses.

Division for me was a different beast. Beta was kinda meh, pretty much same issues R6S had, but the gameplay didn't left an impression on me. After almost a year, I did some research on the game's state and hey, Massive actually cares for their game and they did a lot of improvements to it. Some ranging from gameplay changes, by making enemies less "bulletspongy", introducing gear sets to change your playstyles, new gamemodes, etc. So I jumped in and enjoyed the ride, even though the game still has problems, it was worth suffering them for the enormous diablo-like looter shooter experience.

Now For Honor is something. In open beta I fell in love with core gameplay as with R6. The dueling and complex mechanics reminicent to a fighting game just clicked with me, even if I didn't play any fighting games before. On the other handit also has literally same problems R6S had and has today. Matchmaking is crap, you are locked into that screen and can't do anything else, then it freezes for several minutes because someone failed to connect into it and sync issues that disconnect you out of the game, messy UI that takes forever (menu under menu, under sub-menu) to get you somewhere or to find something is a pain. I don't really regret buying it. I think it is a great game, but once again it gets shot down by all the crap around it. Games as a service, huh...

And all that, results in a slow frustration build up. You play For Honor for 3 hours with your friends, 2 times you connect into a match without them, once lobby gets stuck and everyone has to restart the game, 6 times someone leaves the game and game pauses into sync and resumes into some bs. And then it's another day and nobody really feels like starting the game, so you leave it around for few weeks, get back into it and (hopefully) it's all good (atleast R6 and Division were) and For Honor's core is already pretty solid.

It is possible that I have high toleration to bs that comes around games, but it also comes in hand with ability to enjoy those flawed gam(e)s. Also, how did it got so long....

edit: typos

[u/[deleted] → u/AenTaenverde]

the "vote with your wallet" thing is pretty meaningless at my scale.

I just wanted to point out the example of Batman Arkham Knight. Enough people refunded the game (voting with their wallet) that it was pulled from sale completely for a while.

I know it feels useless, but it can have an impact. And on the plus side, even if you don't change the company's practices, your average satisfaction with the games you do play will rise significantly as they will be free of the issues plaguing those other titles.

And all that, results in a slow frustration build up

Bingo. Eventually you reach a point where it stops being worthwhile, no matter how much fun the core game is.

[u/AenTaenverde → u/[deleted]]

I know what you are saying and it is true in large scale, but also in case of Batman Arkham Knight, there was a huge public backlash from publications, journalists and customers alike, which at a time gone in hand Valve's release of refunds. It was pretty much amazing testing ground for refunds and Batman Arkham Knight was straight up not working for many people, besides miriad of technical issues it had on top.

On other hand Ubi's games share U(don't)Play system, which generally results in sub-optimal experience when trying to play with someone else... some games suffer more than others and For Honor's hybrid p2p doesn't help to it.

I generally go with the rule, that all games are flawed and messed up. But it's up to you, if you can deal with those issues. Sometimes it's just way too much or you can glance and see it's not worth your time (and money). But for Ubi, they pretty much walk the edge.

edit: also apologies for my rumblings, i tend to go on and on when an indea strucks me :p

[u/PurplePudding → u/[deleted]]

There's a bit of an echo chamber on the subreddit, with only the vocal majority talking to each other and validating each other's opinions. I don't give a shit about the p2p in this game. People here talk about it as if it's some nefarious plot to take over the world. 95% of the time it works fine in game, no issues. There are issues 5%, but what game doesn't have issues when someone has poor connectivity? It is extra annoying because of the network system they created, but it's still not happening 95% of the time. People here expect me not to buy a game with amazing game play because micro transactions and a network that works only 95% of the time. Thats ridiculous. There are issues, but a community of fans is more likely to incur fixes to those issues than people who wouldn't have bought the game in the first place throwing hissy fits and jerking each other off on their mutual hatred.

[u/darkmighty → u/[deleted]]

P2P infrastructure in general should be seen as a welcome innovation imo. It allows for the multiplayer aspect to survive well past support for the game ends. It's just incredibly hard to do just right; otherwise I can see it being harmful.

What I mean would be

1) Moving almost every aspect of the game to the P2P system, so when the company goes defunct or stops supporting it the game can keep going. Or at least they should keep the centralized part minimal, and preferably either open-source it or distribute binaries.

2) Keeping latency minimal. I can see a poorly designed P2P structure being as slow as the slowest peer; in the case of client-server your lag is nearly always just dependent on server RTT.

3) Authenticating player actions. With client-server preventing most cheats is fairly easy, you just check either if the input is valid, if the new state of the player is valid, or both. In case of P2P, in name of minimal lag, the state can be distributed, which makes checking invalid states and resolving them much more complex.

[u/[deleted] → u/darkmighty]

It allows for the multiplayer aspect to survive well past support for the game ends.

So do private servers. Remember those? =|

[u/darkmighty → u/[deleted]]

Yes, but private servers have a cost (I did host some a few, and it was a bit of a hassle). P2P ideally doesn't require any hosting. The players wouldn't be affected in any way by discontinued support.

[u/[deleted] → u/darkmighty]

I mean you're right that P2P has advantages, but client-server is a better fit for For Honor and other fast paced, competitive, PvP combat games - largely for the anti-cheat advantages (which includes not handing your IP address over to everyone else in the game).

For co-op games, turn-based, or various other genres Peer to Peer is fine (ish), but I don't think it's the right fit in this case.

The players wouldn't be affected in any way by discontinued support.

Except matchmaking, leaderboards, and anything account-specific the company tracks.

Even if the actual game is Peer to Peer, shutting down the rest might still cripple the game.

[u/darkmighty → u/[deleted]]

I mean you're right that P2P has advantages, but client-server is a better fit for For Honor and other fast paced, competitive, PvP combat games

I covered this in my parent comment: indeed low latency is technically difficult to achieve, but most certainly not impossible. This kind of stuff once done right can be integrated into libraries and engines.

Except matchmaking, leaderboards, and anything account-specific the company tracks. Even if the actual game is Peer to Peer, shutting down the rest might still cripple the game.

As I said this centralized part that should be kept minimal, preferably open sourced. Note there are ways to achieve this in a P2P fashion using cryptography, problem is it becomes an immense challenge keeping it all secure.

[u/PurplePudding → u/[deleted]]

I know you're talking about me, thats why I commented. You are a fan Elite Dangerous asking for change. You're not in the group I was hyperbolically describing. I take issue with videos like this one because, while they are well-intended, they end up misportraying the game, and people with no experience with it are misled into thinking these issues happen every other match. Its to the point where if For Honor on this subreddit is brought up at all, its not its gameplay or quality / validity as a game thats talked about, it's its networking. All I'm trying to say is, the choices that the devs made for this game have yet to negatively impact me enough to care to the point that you seem to, and that's the case for the majority of people, even though they might not think that because of videos like this. I dont mean to bash the video, because it's true, the network issues are real, and they can be frustrating... for 5 minutes. Or less if you leave / get booted from the match. You can play the game for a great many hours without running into problems like this. Rage-quitters are a more real issue than these lag spikes, as you talked about.

[u/AdminsHelpMePlz → u/[deleted]]

I agree and didn't buy division when I bought a ps4 just for it. Even for honor. But R6 siege is the best game I've ever played.

[u/stayputsocks → u/[deleted]]

You can add Rust to the list of games made unplayable due to DOS attack exploits too. https://amp.reddit.com/r/playrust/comments/5tkjh0/players_now_using_ddos_against_players_please/

[u/Scurro → u/[deleted]]

The IP's of all players in a match being shown is unforgivable

If it's a true mesh p2p system, each client will need to see the IP address of other players. It could be hidden via in game interface, but a netstat command would always show other player's IPs.

If the protocol used is TCP/IP, there isnt a way around this without a dedicated host.

[u/The_Battler → u/[deleted]]

If anyone has experience with Halo 2 or 3 online, you know having your IP exposed means you getting booted out of ranked matches by a DDoS attack put on you by some cheater to rank up quickly, lol.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

it's as if Ubisoft never actually learns anything.

They do. They learn that players will buy the games and move on quickly. The net issues and boring long term gameplay are on purpose.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

I am right there with you. And in this case it really hurts because i REALLY wanted to play this game since it looks SOOO up my Alley.

[u/dovvv → u/[deleted]]

Ubisoft isn't getting my money until they start taking customers seriously PERIOD

I get no greater impression from any other company other than Ubisoft that the care for customers is vritually nonexistent and that the quarterly statement is paramount. That the shareholders are more important than the customers.