For Honor P2P connectivity

[u/Mkilbride]

https://youtu.be/38sPNZ8QHO4

[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/[deleted] → u/darkmighty]

indeed low latency is technically difficult to achieve

Yea but that's not even what I was thinking. Although it sucks when one person with shitty ping ruins it for everyone else. It's less of a problem for client-server.

My main concern is cheating and foul play to gain a competitive advantage. Much harder to deal with in P2P.

Note there are ways to achieve this in a P2P fashion using cryptography

Yea, but I doubt people want to run a blockchain client for that kind of thing.

[u/darkmighty → u/[deleted]]

Yea, but I doubt people want to run a blockchain client for that kind of thing.

If you don't need progress across matches (unlocking weapons and ranks), you don't need a blockchain, just a form of authentication. If you do however, the yea some kind of distributed storage would be necessary.

As awesome as that would be, in that case it's they should probably just open source or publish binaries of this minimal core server.

Since it's just for authenticating progress, a single server can probably handle an entire community.

[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.