Warframe is successful enough to have dedicated servers

[Corvid]

26 minutes ago, Karu-QW said:

Oh, what's also funny is how many DE employees are posting here just to disagree with the OP.

Where?

[Zeclem]

2 hours ago, 844448 said:

It's more to host problem, I believe. Not everyone can afford fiber connection or decent pc (who knows if there's someone with ancient relic as pc?)

The question is, is warframe a PvP focused game? I believe not outweighing PvE aspects for now and I made a thread asking for that, a server that can handle 32 players costs 1411 USD a year so how many servers do we need to handle at least 1 million players? And that might result to situation like anthem where you can't login because of the server

you dont have to be a pvp game to care about ping. having connection thats good enough to be a competent pvp game surely wont hurt pve aspects.

2 hours ago, Corvid said:

I seem to recall most Halo games ran on P2P. In fact, one of the main causes of the Master Chief Collection's launch issues was that 343i tried to convert them to run on dedicated servers that they were never built for. In fact, those problems were only solved about 4 years after the original launch (bear in mind that this is a studio that had access to the resources and financial backing of Microsoft).

exceptions can exist, and even halo had a lot of criticisms for that reason. and plenty of games that are out there that can handle dedicated servers easily. its a management problem more often than a resource problem since the need for better servers scales up when you have more customers in the first place, which is how you get the funding from. 

[844448]

1 hour ago, stormy505 said:

A few things.

1. Server and internet pricings are vastly lower outside the US and also usually more powerful. (A lot of US companies throttle their services in order to charge more and pay less.)

2. I obviously can't tell without looking directly but warframes netcode is also probably a huge part of the issue, it feels like it was made by an underfunded indie company back in 2013.

3. warframe is almost certainly able to pay for the servers. if they can spend 250 grand on a glorified PR stunt, they have disposable income. Although justifying the cost is a whole other issue. for games like overwatch or fortnite (PvP competitive games.) having good servers keeps the competitive scene alive and justifys the cost. And competitive games without dedicated servers will suffer, (cough smash cough.) But for a PvE focus game. Good servers don't really bring a profit for de. And at the end of the day, that matters the most.

1. Vastly lower isn't true, the one I see that cost 1,400 USD is the lightweight one and from my thread asking about that, it supports 32 to 64 players with that specs, up to 4824 USD/year for heavyweight one and not in US

There are 195 countries in the world that will need servers for that service. With that as consideration, how much money they will burn in a year just to rent the servers? I had my bad times with server based games where you have no server for Asia and the ping delay is long enough to get you slaughtered without knowing where the attacks come from or having yourself killed because enemy attacks get registered faster so no, I prefer P2P system where I can find someone in my country or someone near enough to play without having delays from servers between players

2. Because DE was an underfunded indie company and warframe was their project when in the edge of bankruptcy before their success with it

3. PR stunts draw attention and make people interested, something that have potential to draw new players (I would grind the hell out of warframe to get that opticor if I didn't know about it in the first place) compared to renting server

My thoughts on this? Leave the P2P system as it is, it's good enough if you have good platform and good internet for that but you can't guarantee someone isn't using an ancient relic to play warframe and with server, I doubt that will be any help. If there's an alternative, let those who have powerful PC able to host their own dedicated server for PvP, we have this configuration for conclave dedicated server

[844448]

10 minutes ago, Zeclem said:

you dont have to be a pvp game to care about ping. having connection thats good enough to be a competent pvp game surely wont hurt pve aspects.

exceptions can exist, and even halo had a lot of criticisms for that reason. and plenty of games that are out there that can handle dedicated servers easily. its a management problem more often than a resource problem since the need for better servers scales up when you have more customers in the first place, which is how you get the funding from. 

Even not being a PvP focused game, I believe it won't be any help if the server is far away from you. Also, connection depends on how good is your platform. There's no point having a good connection if your platform is potato or worse, an ancient relic because I had this problem even with LAN game session in a room with my phone as the local network. The cause? My potato laptop that can't handle the connection fast enough

Now, about handling dedicated servers, I made a thread about servers and a lightweight server costs you 1400 USD, and it handles 32 - 64 players per server so how many servers do you need to handle at least 1 million players (just in case) across 5 regions/195 countries?

[Zeclem]

46 minutes ago, 844448 said:

Even not being a PvP focused game, I believe it won't be any help if the server is far away from you. Also, connection depends on how good is your platform. There's no point having a good connection if your platform is potato or worse, an ancient relic because I had this problem even with LAN game session in a room with my phone as the local network. The cause? My potato laptop that can't handle the connection fast enough

Now, about handling dedicated servers, I made a thread about servers and a lightweight server costs you 1400 USD, and it handles 32 - 64 players per server so how many servers do you need to handle at least 1 million players (just in case) across 5 regions/195 countries?

simple, by doing that thing properly. if a game has 1 million active players then that game must be making crapload of money. other games do it all the time so lets stop pretending as if its completely impossible. 

[40PE]

On 2019-07-25 at 5:38 PM, (XB1)DavidRyder 74 said:

I'm not going to say much, everyone thinks like this.

Host migration is disgusting, having to endure another player's bad connection is disgusting and the fact that Digital Extremes is making hundreds of millions per year gives no excuse to not having dedicated servers.

This is even more important with the squad link, imagine that same Tennocon gameplay but with disconnections and host migrations.

I would be disappointed if Digital Extremes launches Empyrean without dedicated servers. The nightmare of having a consistent gameplay getting cut off by a crappy networking system.

Come on Digital Extremes, you're even upgrading your engine and spending millions on TennoCon, we all know this should be your next jump.

At the first few years of the game, when I did have a bit more limited internet than today, I did some tests and within a month, my upload was 1-2GB  (Sorry now that I recall it was 4-5GB) worth of data just from the game.

If I would do some tests (actually I will check my trusty cfosspeed tonight and give you some data if you want) I assume this would be very similar, don't think the networking part of the game got much better.

I honestly don't think they want to pay for the amount of throughput the servers would require. I mean I play MMO games, FPS games other than WF, and those are much much lighter on the network, we talking about fractions of traffic vs. WF.

They know this, that is the main reason I believe, why they don't want to do this.

Edited July 29, 2019 by 40PE

[844448]

1 minute ago, Zeclem said:

simple, by doing that thing properly. if a game has 1 million active players then that game must be making crapload of money. other games do it all the time so lets stop pretending as if its completely impossible. 

Not impossible, but making crapload of money? I don't think so, considering how you can play warframe with no fee and get everything for free and how many that buy platinum only when they get 50% or 75% discount, unless there's some mandatory purchase like base game or DLC and 1 million is just in case, because we don't have any exact number

Also, saying "by doing that thing properly" doesn't make it as simple as you see it

[Zeclem]

1 minute ago, 844448 said:

Not impossible, but making crapload of money? I don't think so, considering how you can play warframe with no fee and get everything for free and how many that buy platinum only when they get 50% or 75% discount, unless there's some mandatory purchase like base game or DLC and 1 million is just in case, because we don't have any exact number

you cant play this game without plat. and all the plat in the system had to be bought at some point. and the fact that the prime accesses are still massively overpriced should be a good sign that people are actually buying it. de definitely makes craploads. 

1 minute ago, 844448 said:

Also, saying "by doing that thing properly" doesn't make it as simple as you see it

i never said it was simple. i said it was doable. theres a huge difference. 

[844448]

Just now, Zeclem said:

you cant play this game without plat. and all the plat in the system had to be bought at some point. and the fact that the prime accesses are still massively overpriced should be a good sign that people are actually buying it. de definitely makes craploads. 

i never said it was simple. i said it was doable. theres a huge difference. 

Plat has to be bought, which can be walked around through it from trading, reducing the number of players that actually buy platinum like me as an example. I've played from 2014, has numerous skins and haven't dropped a single dime on warframe until now so there's some reduction on numbers

12 minutes ago, Zeclem said:

simple, by doing that thing properly. if a game has 1 million active players then that game must be making crapload of money. other games do it all the time so lets stop pretending as if its completely impossible. 

That sounds like you saying it's simple in your eyes, and saying "it's doable" or "doing that thing properly" doesn't explain how you handle servers across the world when not everyone has the same quality on internet. You should explain how to handle the servers for people from 5 regions without wasting too much power and make sure people will never see any lag or host migration with any kind of platform and internet quality

[Zeclem]

30 minutes ago, 844448 said:

Plat has to be bought, which can be walked around through it from trading, reducing the number of players that actually buy platinum like me as an example. I've played from 2014, has numerous skins and haven't dropped a single dime on warframe until now so there's some reduction on numbers

i dont think you understand, just because you walked away from paying it doesnt change the fact that someone, somewhere bought that plat. it did not came out of nowhere just because you got it for free, cus again, someone DID pay for that plat. 

30 minutes ago, 844448 said:

That sounds like you saying it's simple in your eyes, and saying "it's doable" or "doing that thing properly" doesn't explain how you handle servers across the world when not everyone has the same quality on internet. You should explain how to handle the servers for people from 5 regions without wasting too much power and make sure people will never see any lag or host migration with any kind of platform and internet quality

and that sounds like you are putting words in my mouth. actually no, it doesnt sound like it. its exactly it. so how about being honest and not doing that at all?

and why the everliving hell would i need to explain how to set up a complex system to say that system is doable? i dont need to be a rocket scientist to say that rockets are doable. so no, i dont have to explain it. 

[844448]

1 minute ago, Zeclem said:

i dont think you understand, just because you walked away from paying it doesnt change the fact that someone, somewhere bought that plat. it did not came out of nowhere just because you got it for free, cus again, someone DID pay for that plat. 

and that sounds like you are putting words in my mouth. actually no, it doesnt sound like it. its exactly it. so how about being honest and not doing that at all?

and why the everliving hell would i need to explain how to set up a complex system to say that system is doable? i dont need to be a rocket scientist to say that rockets are doable. so no, i dont have to explain it. 

That gives you an insight that making a crapton of money is an assumption

You want to have dedicated servers and you know it's complex so you would be able to explain why it's doable from every aspect when it's something complex, not just saying "it's doable"

[Zeclem]

4 minutes ago, 844448 said:

That gives you an insight that making a crapton of money is an assumption

a top seller game on steam is indeed making crapton of money. are we gonna discuss semantics now?

Quote

You want to have dedicated servers and you know it's complex so you would be able to explain why it's doable from every aspect when it's something complex, not just saying "it's doable"

that makes no sense whatsoever. i want a car, and i know its a complex thing to build a car so i should know how to build a car to be able to want one? thats absolute nonsense. 

Edited July 29, 2019 by Zeclem

[WhiteMarker]

2 hours ago, Karu-QW said:

Oh, what's also funny is how many DE employees are posting here just to disagree with the OP.

What employee are you talking about?
Who in this thread is an employee at DE?

[SneakyErvin]

DE seems to definently have the success with WF to implement dedicated servers.

People blurping out the "but the netcode needs to be better" really have no clue. If the netcode is stable enough for Peer-to-peer in PvE at the moment and already stable enough for dedicated (yet privately hosted) servers for Conclave then the netcode is already good enough for dedicated servers. It simply cant get worse than PtP PvE or the private dedicated servers that run conclave.

We are afterall only talking about dedicated servers, yet when we do many of you "must have better netcode" likely think MMO style servers. No one is talking about upping the player numbers per mission/instance, we are simply talking about a DE hosted server farm that handles the connections. Netcode would really only need to be improved if you wanted sporadic connections and player-to-player encounters everywhere. However, we will never have more than the 4 player (or 10 depending how Railjack ends up or if raids come back) instances, which means the netcode will only need to be good enough to handle that, which is already is, otherwise we'd have more issues with PtP than poor connection between players and host migs.

[844448]

7 minutes ago, Zeclem said:

a top seller game on steam is indeed making crapton of money. are we gonna discuss semantics now?

that makes no sense whatsoever. i want a car, and i know its a complex thing to build a car so i should know how to build a car to be able to want one? thats absolute nonsense. 

Why don't you provide the number on how much money they earn annually? That will prove better that they're making crapton of money, otherwise it's just merely an assumption

You expect things will run smoothly forever? If you want something, you would at least have some basic understanding about it. Also, only saying having dedicated server is doable is not going to get you anywhere, saying they should do it properly only makes it like a childish rant about wanting to have something and people here are already answered why it's not a really good idea

[SneakyErvin]

11 minutes ago, 844448 said:

Why don't you provide the number on how much money they earn annually? That will prove better that they're making crapton of money, otherwise it's just merely an assumption

You expect things will run smoothly forever? If you want something, you would at least have some basic understanding about it. Also, only saying having dedicated server is doable is not going to get you anywhere, saying they should do it properly only makes it like a childish rant about wanting to have something and people here are already answered why it's not a really good idea

Revenue $277.7mil in 2018, +36.6% compared to 2017. 

Profit $141.5mil in 2018, +27.7% compared to 2017.

They also gained 29.2% total users aswell as seeing an increase of monthly users by 24.9% and concurrent users by 28.1% compared to the prior year.

edit: Sidenote, Google is your friend.

edit 2: This also means that dedicated server costs would be of really no issue for them since they have 141 mil of wiggle room, which is an amount that would be far from consumed by dedicated servers. Now if you live in the US it might be difficult to grasp just how stoneage and backwoods your internet actually is aswell as how inexpensive server providers actually are in the rest of the world. 

Edited July 29, 2019 by SneakyErvin

[844448]

1 minute ago, SneakyErvin said:

Revenue $277.7mil in 2018, +36.6% compared to 2017. 

Profit $141.5mil in 2018, +27.7% compared to 2017.

They also gained 29.2% total users aswell as seeing an increase of monthly users by 24.9% and concurrent users by 28.1% compared to the prior year.

edit: Sidenote, Google is your friend.

Alright, the profit is $141.5 million, and made a quick rough calculation from how many players you can handle with a server (around 32 - 64 on lightweight server) with the annual price and the amount of money spent to provide servers for 1 million players is 43.75 million. That amount of money is better allocated to make better content or get better developer, isn't it?

[SneakyErvin]

1 minute ago, 844448 said:

Alright, the profit is $141.5 million, and made a quick rough calculation from how many players you can handle with a server (around 32 - 64 on lightweight server) with the annual price and the amount of money spent to provide servers for 1 million players is 43.75 million. That amount of money is better allocated to make better content or get better developer, isn't it?

What is better or not isnt easy to say. It all depends how many more players dedicated servers would bring since it is a massive QoL move and something that is fairly baseline for most online only games these days and has been for the last 10 years or so. Even Path of Exile launched with it and they have zero issues to keep running and being as (or more) successful as WF.

You also have to remember, the profit is not the only thing that that goes into development. Parts of it carry over, but what is often stated as profit is actually pure profit i.e everything that is left after paying the bills and investing in projects for the coming year. They arent only left with those 141 millions, those are simply the pure profit numbers for 2018 which stack ontol of the 100+ millions of pure profit from 2017 etc.

I'm not sure where you get your server numbers from, or the costs. $43.75 per person looks extremely overpriced, even for american standards. Or does this include the hardware aswell?

[844448]

2 minutes ago, SneakyErvin said:

What is better or not isnt easy to say. It all depends how many more players dedicated servers would bring since it is a massive QoL move and something that is fairly baseline for most online only games these days and has been for the last 10 years or so. Even Path of Exile launched with it and they have zero issues to keep running and being as (or more) successful as WF.

You also have to remember, the profit is not the only thing that that goes into development. Parts of it carry over, but what is often stated as profit is actually pure profit i.e everything that is left after paying the bills and investing in projects for the coming year. They arent only left with those 141 millions, those are simply the pure profit numbers for 2018 which stack ontol of the 100+ millions of pure profit from 2017 etc.

I'm not sure where you get your server numbers from, or the costs. $43.75 per person looks extremely overpriced, even for american standards. Or does this include the hardware aswell?

From a lightweight server that able to handle 32 players, it costs $1400 a year located in Lithuania. On other countries, some are more expensive with dual core so to support 1 million players, that gives result of 31,250 servers for a total of roughly $43.75 million, hardware included

[SaidTheRogue]

when are you ppl gonna learn.. your stupid ping setting in the options has little to do with this, and wont save you from migrations.

your ping time to someone whos hosting you is just a very, very rough indication of what you can expect/set forth and typically has nothing to do with;

1. how good their internet is

2. how good their pc is

3. how favorable the routing is between you and they

you can jack off your precious ping slider setting in the options all you want, it makes very little difference. its been years that the game has been running, therefore this is known by now.

[SneakyErvin]

2 hours ago, 844448 said:

From a lightweight server that able to handle 32 players, it costs $1400 a year located in Lithuania. On other countries, some are more expensive with dual core so to support 1 million players, that gives result of 31,250 servers for a total of roughly $43.75 million, hardware included

The servers will likely be set up very differently though because it wont be 32 or 64 player servers in the way shooters like Battlefield do it. They will probably be set up similar to how PoE solves it, although for single play there wont be a need for a different type of connection than we have now, since the single player experience is near flawless as is. So they'd get away with far lower costs compared to how GGG handles it in PoE where every single person has their own personal instance on a server, with lag and everything else.

[RX-3DR]

5 minutes ago, SneakyErvin said:

The servers will likely be set up very differently though because it wont be 32 or 64 player servers in the way shooters like Battlefield do it. They will probably be set up similar to how PoE solves it, although for single play there wont be a need for a different type of connection than we have now, since the single player experience is near flawless as is. So they'd get away with far lower costs compared to how GGG handles it in PoE where every single person has their own personal instance on a server, with lag and everything else.

You're kind of cherry-picking your comparison here.

Movement and actions in PoE are rather strict and defined, you are moving from X:Y to X:Y, you are using A towards X:Y, enemy E at X:Y uses attack S towards X:Y. Waframe is not as simple and you can have a ton of data being sent as you bounce from XYZ at direction with a velocity of V with a wall bounce while firing your gun at another direction and using a single-handed ability. Even if you trimmed down some cost by not hosting solo instances (You can't do this just because a player is alone because if someone joins, it means his session would, ironically, need to be migrated to the server), what you save might not cover the additional cost you're paying for better hardware and connectivity.

[Luciole77]

lets get real...warframe is not a tottally "sucess"...

i dont think they will add dedicated servers because cost a lot of money!

[marelooke]

On 2019-07-25 at 5:38 PM, (XB1)DavidRyder 74 said:

I'm not going to say much, everyone thinks like this.

Host migration is disgusting, having to endure another player's bad connection is disgusting and the fact that Digital Extremes is making hundreds of millions per year gives no excuse to not having dedicated servers.

This is even more important with the squad link, imagine that same Tennocon gameplay but with disconnections and host migrations.

I would be disappointed if Digital Extremes launches Empyrean without dedicated servers. The nightmare of having a consistent gameplay getting cut off by a crappy networking system.

Come on Digital Extremes, you're even upgrading your engine and spending millions on TennoCon, we all know this should be your next jump.

Dedicated servers for a game this size are extremely expensive, they would need to set them up across the globe as well or ping in a great many regions that are mostly fine currently due to P2P would be horrendous. Given how well the P2P system generally works for Warframe there's very little added value to having dedicated servers (barring for certain areas, like hubs) and add to that the amount of money they won't be able to use for creating actual content and it's just not worth it.

[SneakyErvin]

1 hour ago, RX-3DR said:

You're kind of cherry-picking your comparison here.

Movement and actions in PoE are rather strict and defined, you are moving from X:Y to X:Y, you are using A towards X:Y, enemy E at X:Y uses attack S towards X:Y. Waframe is not as simple and you can have a ton of data being sent as you bounce from XYZ at direction with a velocity of V with a wall bounce while firing your gun at another direction and using a single-handed ability. Even if you trimmed down some cost by not hosting solo instances (You can't do this just because a player is alone because if someone joins, it means his session would, ironically, need to be migrated to the server), what you save might not cover the additional cost you're paying for better hardware and connectivity.

Movement actually isnt so strict in PoE. It may look like it yes but you still have a three dimensional movement setup in it. Hence why you can leap up cliffsides aswell as getting annoyed when your AoE ends up above the targets because their happened to be a ledge of a different elevation. Sure it isnt like WF and I dont think I ever said that, but there are still major similarities when you start comparing if it would be viable to implement dedicated servers in WF.

I'm also not sure what you are talking about regarding solo. If I pick solo in the game now, I will not be joined by others. Or are you talking about signing up and ending up in a match alone? In that case you still signed up for group play so it is not the solo I talk about at all.

I'm just amazed so many are happy with the S#&$ty peer-to-peer we are stuck with and fight tooth and claw against any suggestions regarding dedicated servers. WF is afterall trying to keep up with the times, dedicated servers would be a natural step. Heck dedicated servers are probably more evolving for the game than adding a bunch of flashy graphics, both costing resources and one which would actually be a massive QoL.