Cry from the heart

[BeergeekTV]

Dear Warframe Community,

I write this message not just as a player but as a passionate fan of the Warframe universe. We've invested countless hours in this game, enjoyed its complex lore, diverse characters, and dynamic combat system. We have celebrated its successes, and like true fans, have stuck by its side during challenging times.
 

However, the persistent network issues have been a growing concern for us all. We've all experienced the frustration of an unexpected disconnection, a lag that cost us the match, or a game-breaking bug that has stripped us of our hard-earned resources. With recent release of Duviri - this got worse.
 

These problems stem from a root cause: the current network architecture that relies on peer-to-peer (P2P) hosting rather than server-based session hosting. While this might have been a viable approach in the past, it's time to acknowledge that it no longer meets the demands of the modern gaming landscape.
 

Today, we call upon Digital Extremes to prioritize the stability, reliability, and performance of Warframe. Before we explore new planets, engage with new factions, or wield new weapons, we need a game that functions consistently and efficiently. We need a network infrastructure that's robust and resilient, something that can truly bring out the potential of our beloved game in 2023 and beyond.
 

Let's make our voices heard. Let's urge Digital Extremes to prioritize the renovation of Warframe's network system, to shift from client-hosted sessions to a dedicated server or cloud-based infrastructure. This is not a small task, and it may mean that new content will be delayed, but it's a necessary step for the long-term health and success of Warframe.
 

Let's remember that a game's true value is not just in its content but in its performance, reliability, and the overall experience it provides. Let's stand together to urge Digital Extremes to take the necessary steps to future-proof our game, for us and for the generations of Tenno to come.
 

Let's create a united front for a better Warframe. We are not just players, but a community, and together, we can help shape the future of our game.

[rhoenix]

This is an excellent point.  Especially when dealing with many different platforms and architectures, having game servers to help solidify and stabilize game connections becomes more important than ever.

That a strong attempt is being made to port Warframe to mobile devices only underscores the point - P2P connections on mobile clients will have an even stronger need for server-side connections to make things stable.

[0_The_F00l]

I am in full support of this and have requested it myself.

Do note that warframe is a F2P game , and as such anything that uses dedicated servers usually have a subscription or some sort of purchase requirement.

Now DE is no longer an indie developer and is backed by Tencent , so i do believe they are capable of hosting some servers. But just highlighting that this may entail some sort of added cost to work. 

[Pakaku]

10 minutes ago, BeergeekTV said:

Today, we call upon Digital Extremes

I think we were calling for something a little earlier than that...

[trst]

Personally I'd prefer that DE didn't spend the time and resources on dedicated servers.

They wouldn't entirely resolve connection related issues and session drops as it does nothing regarding client connections. As well having players go from connecting to the nearest host they'd have to deal with connecting to the nearest server which would result in a worse default connection quality for some. And if the system was forced for even solo players then all solo players would end up with a worse overall experience. Plus the majority of missions are too short for there to be any real benefit from dedicated hosting.

And all of that is on top of the monetary investment it would be for DE both in dealing with buying/renting and maintaining servers. And is one that'd be large enough that it'd be a concern as to how they would recuperate the costs. As it never matters if a business can afford something but how it impacts their profits and at the end of the day DE is a business and would have their owners (Tencent) to answer to regarding the issue.

[BeergeekTV]

7 minutes ago, trst said:

Personally I'd prefer that DE didn't spend the time and resources on dedicated servers.

Guess any game nowadays will have part of community wishing it to lie down and die slowly and painfully.

I'd disagree with most of your points but want to summarize my answer - neither solo sessions requiring a server to host a session, neither having clients with different amount of hops to closest server, neither session duration (and shorter session is actually good) are current a problem. Not even "an expensive question". Indie studios can afford it. DE is "under" Tencent, not an indie any longer.

P.S. Take a look on EVE Online, being indie once, then was acquired by Pearl Abyss (known for being greedy and p2w-oriented) - they are polishing, improving and eveng innovating sometimes when it comes to networking for their game.

[trst]

Just now, BeergeekTV said:

Guess any game nowadays will have part of community wishing it to lie down and die slowly and painfully.

Connection issues aren't killing the game. Especially when it's an issue, like pretty much every issue this game has, that doesn't affect all players equally. Those with a more stable/better quality internet connections generally see fewer bugs and migrations overall. As well these issues don't affect players who stick to solo.

Switching to dedicated would negatively impact the experiences of some portion of the playerbase just for the benefit of maybe preventing an issue they may never deal with in the first place. And again there would be the ever present concern regarding how DE would pay for servers in the first place.

[BeergeekTV]

12 minutes ago, trst said:

Connection issues aren't killing the game. Especially when it's an issue, like pretty much every issue this game has, that doesn't affect all players equally. Those with a more stable/better quality internet connections generally see fewer bugs and migrations overall. As well these issues don't affect players who stick to solo.

Poor QA, "profitability over quality" issues are known and normal for many games. But this thread is about one specific matter - outdated, non-scalable network layer implementation.

Edit: oh, i forgot of "publisher/owner forced deadlines"...

[BeergeekTV]

29 minutes ago, trst said:

Switching to dedicated would negatively impact the experiences of some portion of the playerbase just for the benefit of maybe preventing an issue they may never deal with in the first place. And again there would be the ever present concern regarding how DE would pay for servers in the first place.

I see a flaw in this logic. If a person had unstable connection before (which caused game sessions to drop when he was hosts, or disconnects when he wasn't), he'll face those issues (likely) again. But in case of server-based game hosting - we won't affect other peoples gameplay, since everyone's client. Plus there's no unfair advantage of being a host and having better latency (i'd say close to 0) values because of that. No overhead and no risk of losing session results, because individual clients won't have to use client-based session host as proxy, to feed it's progress and results to existing DE servers which basically store only worldstate.

[Rakosta_Kai]

8 minutes ago, BeergeekTV said:

Poor QA, "profitability over quality" issues are known and normal for many games. 

 Yes, but that is not relevant to the post you quoted though. So I fail to see the equivalence.

10 minutes ago, BeergeekTV said:

But this thread is about one specific matter - outdated, non-scalable network layer implementation.

In a 10 yr old game where the issue is neither universal or particularly even common...

We have had the discussion of DE server hosting this game numerous times over the years and, honestly,  the game is at a point where doing so now won't bring a meaningful return on the investment of having done so (even though Tencent has the infrastructure).
If this was a real consideration back when POE launched it'd be worth doing. Likewise, I sincerely hope DE uses it for Soulframe (or whatever the new game will be called)

As of now, It's a losing proposition at this point on both logistic and revenue fronts. It's functionally equivalent to locking the barn after the horse has run off.

That said, I don't see any harm in you asking for it as you have every right to your opinion on the matter. They instituted Cross-Play at long last (whether that generated revenue or not)
It is weird to see you engage in a debate about it given the age of the game though. 

[PublikDomain]

39 minutes ago, trst said:

They wouldn't entirely resolve connection related issues and session drops as it does nothing regarding client connections. As well having players go from connecting to the nearest host they'd have to deal with connecting to the nearest server which would result in a worse default connection quality for some. And if the system was forced for even solo players then all solo players would end up with a worse overall experience. Plus the majority of missions are too short for there to be any real benefit from dedicated hosting.

A thought, though. Dedicated servers are, at least structurally, not much different than a regular client. Going from P2P to dedicated is a lot easier than the other way around, and we do already have it for hubs and Conclave. DE doesn't need to reinvent their whole networking architecture since it's already supported, and they haven't needed to force this feature on IE solo players so far so why would they in the future? Instead they could, if they wanted to, have a floating pool of dedicated servers for high-population and/or long-duration PUGs. Maybe you get a dedicated host, maybe you get P2P. They don't need to cover every single session, but every extra instance would help with stability for new and popular content. It doesn't even have to be a visible thing, they could just do it in the background and no one would be able to notice. Heck, it doesn't even need to be permanent. They could spin up or down servers following CCUs and big updates. Maybe a month after a big update like Duviri when the dust has settled and the main bugs have been worked out they could wind down and let P2P take back over.

[rhoenix]

Just now, PublikDomain said:

A thought, though. Dedicated servers are, at least structurally, not much different than a regular client. Going from P2P to dedicated is a lot easier than the other way around, and we do already have it for hubs and Conclave. DE doesn't need to reinvent their whole networking architecture since it's already supported, and they haven't needed to force this feature on IE solo players so far so why would they in the future? Instead they could, if they wanted to, have a floating pool of dedicated servers for high-population and/or long-duration PUGs. Maybe you get a dedicated host, maybe you get P2P. They don't need to cover every single session, but every extra instance would help with stability for new and popular content. It doesn't even have to be a visible thing, they could just do it in the background and no one would be able to notice.

Exactly.  If implemented in this way, then the game would either use a player's connection as the sync point if it was better for that session, or if not it could fall back to the closest regional host server.

[BeergeekTV]

1 minute ago, Padre_Akais said:

It is weird to see you engage in a debate about it given the age of the game though. 

Age isn't an excuse. EVE Online, also indie mmo at start, with 20 years of history, got at least 3 major network layer and infrastructure changes, and countless small upgrades. And that's before being acquired by Pearl Abyss.

[Turritopsis_Dohrnii]

I do have a question if Peer-to-peer would be dropped in favor of dedicated servers… I think I heard that because that the game is “peer-to-peer” it would be easy to convert the game to an offline state if the need arises.

If the game were to be under dedicated servers, would that hinder the ability for Warframe to convert to an offline game or am I just misinformed?

[BeergeekTV]

5 minutes ago, Turritopsis_Dohrnii said:

I do have a question if Peer-to-peer would be dropped in favor of dedicated servers… I think I heard that because that the game is “peer-to-peer” it would be easy to convert the game to an offline state if the need arises.

If the game were to be under dedicated servers, would that hinder the ability for Warframe to convert to an offline game or am I just misinformed?

There will be problems. To avoid tampering client information (ex: resources you get after mission) transferred - there will be no game state, for mission session stored on client as "source of truth". So you weren't misinformed. Yet i doubt that at the end of times (when Tencent and DE decide to throw the game into thrash bin) - they will care about making it 100% offline for game fans to continue playing locally.

[rhoenix]

To elaborate a bit for context - this issue isn't really an "either we keep things as they are now, OR we have entirely dedicated servers for games." 

This is actually a grey area, where when someone means "server" they can simply be other ways of syncing between players if the players' connection isn't as stable as the servers would be, and otherwise games would work as they do now.

When one includes the concept of adding mobile devices into the connection mix, I can only imagine the cold sweats the network engineers wake up dealing with.

[BeergeekTV]

8 minutes ago, rhoenix said:

When one includes the concept of adding mobile devices into the connection mix, I can only imagine the cold sweats the network engineers wake up dealing with.

Yeah, had a bit of cold sweat myself after reading your initial answer mentioning mobile devices.

With proper protocol implementation, right choice of stack - actual load on server to host a session for 4 people would be very low, allowing hundreds if not thousands of sessions at the same time on quite an average server unit (or virtualized one) configuration. People who complain about dedicated servers don't even take in account that even a potato can host a warframe session on lowest graphics settings possible. Current network protocol resource usage for host is laughably and miserably small. So having a server-based game sessions isn't a disaster (except of development and qa to implement and properly test it).

[Rakosta_Kai]

On 2023-05-10 at 10:47 AM, BeergeekTV said:

Age isn't an excuse. EVE Online, also indie mmo at start, with 20 years of history, got at least 3 major network layer and infrastructure changes, and countless small upgrades. And that's before being acquired by Pearl Abyss.

Age isn't relevant.
Profit is relevant.
Fans of this game are already fans of this game. Server hosting isn't going to increase the size of the audience (unlike Cross-Play).

Doing what you have described costs money, isn't guaranteed to grow the playerbase, and offers no guarantee toward increasing revenue.

FWIW, Eve Online as an argument is a bad example. The game has spent the bulk of it's existence as a game dipping into every conceivable revenue model (buy to play, sub, micro, and free to play) and has only ever done it's updates to ensure connection consistency over time. 

So should DE start offering subscriptions as well?  /s

[BeergeekTV]

9 minutes ago, Padre_Akais said:

Fans of this game are already fans of this game. Server hosting isn't going to increase the size of the audience (unlike Cross-Play).
Doing what you have described costs money, isn't guaranteed to grow the playerbase, and offers no guarantee toward increasing revenue.

FWIW, Eve Online as an argument is a bad example. The game has spent the bulk of it's existence as a game dipping into every conceivable revenue model (buy to play, sub, micro, and free to play) and has only ever done it's updates to ensure connection consistency over time. 

So should DE start offering subscriptions as well?

Yet EVE is ~ 2 times older, having new content, contstantly improving it's network layer (larger battles now possible with smaller or even no time slow). Who cares abouth how they tried to find best possible monetization approach. They are stable, have same stable and non-fluctuating player base (active and overall). But they continue improve game's technical aspects. While Warframe mostly gets content/frames/weapons updates and fixes/triages for years-long bugs and mechanics (including network layer/protocol)

P.S. Subscriptions won't provide that healthy and stable money inflow like current DE's monetization model.

[Yamazuki]

The problem with this is you would have to make this optional or have a bunch of servers that fragment the player base further.

For pve games, I actually prefer p2p over dedicated servers because I get to play the game as a host and as a client my ping is lower than games with dedicated servers unless I'm playing at off times such as 4 AM and get matched with a host on a different continent. Majority of games with dedicated servers I'm stuck with an inconsistent feeling 80-140 ping depending on how far east the server is located for NA.

I don't know why people act like games with dedicated servers are problem free to begin with. I have always wished more games used p2p for any instanced activity that wasn't pvp; especially given how action combat games tend to be ping sensitive making them feel worse for anyone not able to live close to their server.

[BeergeekTV]

Just now, Yamazuki said:

The problem with this is you would have to make this optional or have a bunch of servers that fragment the player base further.

For pve games, I actually prefer p2p over dedicated servers because I get to play the game as a host and as a client my ping is lower than games with dedicated servers unless I'm playing at off times such as 4 AM and get matched with a host on a different continent. Majority of games with dedicated servers I'm stuck with an inconsistent feeling 80-140 ping depending on how far east the server is located for NA.

I don't know why people act like games with dedicated servers are problem free to begin with. I have always wished more games used p2p for any instanced activity that wasn't pvp; especially given how action combat games tend to be ping sensitive making them feel worse for anyone not able to live close to their server.

P2P, even for PvE is never an answer. I started playing vanilla WoW being on dial-up connection, having latency of 250+ to closest server in Europe, and that was ok. You don't have competitive element (PvP from your example), plus most of people have average reaction time >120ms, plus any multiplayer/mass multiplayer/online game nowadays utilizes prediction/normalization techniques to function and feel lagless even at 300-500ms latencies. We just got used to relatively smooth Warframe gameplay (until host leaves/disconnects come into play), but server-hosted sessions won't be that terrible as you describe.

[PublikDomain]

2 minutes ago, Turritopsis_Dohrnii said:

If the game were to be under dedicated servers, would that hinder the ability for Warframe to convert to an offline game or am I just misinformed?

Yes and no. If P2P were fully retired you'd need to connect to a server to play missions, even solo. But Warframe is already an always-online game (kinda mostly), so it's not like you'd be able to play entirely offline no matter what the networking architecture is. You still need to be connected to update your account information, get mission rewards, make purchases, etc. There's also no reason to fully retire P2P when we could just have DE's fleet of servers acting as a host when needed. Expanding dedicated server support doesn't need to mean taking away P2P, we can (and do) have both.

5 minutes ago, Padre_Akais said:

So should DE start offering subscriptions as well?

Why not? There's no reason they couldn't if money was that much of a problem. They could sell access to the dedicated server pool with a Tenno Gold subscription or whatever. Say it's $10 a month and you get that and a monthly stipend of plat, it's easy money. They could also allow player-hosted dedicated server pools to cut down on operating costs, with maybe a little profile badge or armor set like Guides of the Lotus for patrons. They've already got leaderboards for dedicated Conclave servers so it's not like it's a new idea.

[BeergeekTV]

3 minutes ago, PublikDomain said:

Why not? There's no reason they couldn't if money was that much of a problem. They could sell access to the dedicated server pool with a Tenno Gold subscription or whatever. Say it's $10 a month and you get that and a monthly stipend of plat, it's easy money. They could also allow player-hosted dedicated server pools to cut down on operating costs, with maybe a little profile badge or armor set like Guides of the Lotus for patrons. They've already got leaderboards for dedicated Conclave servers so it's not like it's a new idea.

Limiting payment model to pay-2-play, and having active player base ~650.000 most likely will result is worse money inflow, than having sporadic but large amount purchases for certain percent of playerbase, and the rest paying whatever they consider affordable each month, purchasing plat for 10-20 euro, allowing some part of playerbase to pay nothing (grind and sell items for plat ingame). No surprise f2p+shop or hybrid subscription+cosmetic shop are resulting in better yearly financial reports for companies :)

[BeergeekTV]

In the void's cold dance,
Host disconnects, endless trance,
Warframe's lost advance.

[Rakosta_Kai]

24 minutes ago, PublikDomain said:

Why not? There's no reason they couldn't if money was that much of a problem. They could sell access to the dedicated server pool with a Tenno Gold subscription or whatever. Say it's $10 a month and you get that and a monthly stipend of plat, it's easy money. They could also allow player-hosted dedicated server pools to cut down on operating costs, with maybe a little profile badge or armor set like Guides of the Lotus for patrons. They've already got leaderboards for dedicated Conclave servers so it's not like it's a new idea.

No argument from me on that point. I was among the first to suggest a subscription model back when the game was in it's early days.

It wasn't a particularly popular opinion back then due the amount of content though.