Dedicated Servers

[GoldenToad]

Why is it 10 years later we're still running on a peer-to-peer hosting service?

Let me put the situation into perspective for you guys:

Dead by Daylight only has around 40,000 - 50,000 active players during peak hours each day.

Warframe boasts around 60,000 to 80,000 active players during peak hours each day.

 

Fun Fact: Both are owned by companies based in Canada!

 

Dead by Daylight has a net worth just shy of $1M USD and makes around $230k USD per year.

Warframe makes around $175M USD per year.

 

Dead by Daylight has Dedicated Servers for their game.

Warframe does not.

 

Why is this. "It's not a pvp game" is irrelevant, host migration is one of the largest gripes people have about the game. It causes so many issues such as Lost Progress because the host's computer crashed and the data on their internal server was never sent to the other people in the session. Sure, sometimes you get your materials back if it sync'd in time but more often than not that does not happen- you just lose your progression and loot.

It's not like buying servers would make Warframe go broke- they make 760x higher revenue than Dead by Daylight yet DBD has servers while Warframe does not.

 

Dead by Daylight has similar active player numbers as Warframe too so there is no excuse.

Dead by Daylight makes the same amount as 2-3 households put together per year. If the average household income was 76k USD per year.

Warframe makes as much as 2,302 households. That's large enough to be its own village.

[(PSN)IndianChiefJeff]

If the metrics are accurate, it all comes down to stinginess.

[(XBOX)C11H22O11]

?

Monetized YouTube channels collect revenue by displaying ads for every one thousand video views. YouTubers can earn an average of between $3 to $7 per thousand video views. With this data, we predict the Dead by Daylight YouTube channel generates $15.34 thousand in ad revenue a month and $230.16 thousand a year.

They're talking about the money DBD YouTube channel makes not the game, find a better source or your whole argument falls apart.

[(XBOX)CaligulaTwily]

Dead by Daylight is that terrible, "play tag" chase people in circles game while they throw crates and fix generators game or something, right?

That terrible game has dedicated servers, and Warframe doesn't? 

[Cerikus]

2 hours ago, GoldenToad said:

Why is it 10 years later we're still running on a peer-to-peer hosting service?

Because of the reality of game development. 

When DE decided to make Warframe all publishers turned them down, so they had to publish it themselves. It was basically "we can make this work" or "company goes bankrupt". Because of that it was impossible for them to host their own servers (no money), so they built the game on a P2P architecture. To change it now would require a complete rework of 10 old netcode and all the layers of changes over the years.

[trst]

DBD being a PvP game is literally the reason they have dedicated servers while Warframe doesn't.

A PvP game requires it so that the game is fair for all parties by avoiding a "host advantage". Which DBD did have before going dedicated as the Killer was always the host and if they had a poor connection quality they still ended up with a stable game while all the survivors had awful lag and desynced interactions.

Meanwhile a co-op game doesn't have such a thing as "host advantage". The only advantage a game like WF would get from going dedicated would be stability (and potential security concerns). But stability isn't that big of a concern when the average mission length is in the 5 minute range. Plus there's also the main drawback of dedicated with players potentially losing connection quality due to being forced to connect to the nearest server instead of being their own host or getting a more local host.

 

Really the decision comes down to money, and no it's not about being able to afford it or not. The concern is regarding the payoff of investing into dedicated servers. A game like DBD would gain from such an investment as a PvP environment requires it for fair play. Where it's far more difficult to justify the investment for a co-op game when the majority of interactions are as short as they are and there's the possibility of worsening connections in some areas/regions.

Also if connection issues are as widespread as players act like they are then DE would know if going dedicated would be worth the investment. And since they've still not gone down that route it seems safe to assume that they don't find it a worthwhile investment.

[GoldenToad]

43 minutes ago, (XBOX)C11H22O11 said:

?

Monetized YouTube channels collect revenue by displaying ads for every one thousand video views. YouTubers can earn an average of between $3 to $7 per thousand video views. With this data, we predict the Dead by Daylight YouTube channel generates $15.34 thousand in ad revenue a month and $230.16 thousand a year.

They're talking about the money DBD YouTube channel makes not the game, find a better source or your whole argument falls apart.

And who owns the DBD Youtube channel smart one. If anything this compounds my "argument"

Edited May 27, 2023 by GoldenToad

[(XBOX)C11H22O11]

17 minutes ago, GoldenToad said:

And who owns the DBD Youtube channel smart one. If anything this compounds my "argument"

You're comparing how much money Warframe makes from the game to DBD's YouTube channel revenue what are you even talking about?

No duh DBD owns their channel that's 230k just from that, they also earn money from merch and the game which is what you should be comparing not the YouTube channel.

Edited May 27, 2023 by (XBOX)C11H22O11
remove the swear just in case

[XDuchxd]

Well, considering P2P downsides, etc. Warframe should have dedicated servers because it is a solution to many problems, but still comparing companies' money isn't a great idea.

[(PSN)jaggerwanderer]

Epic Games owns Warframe now. If Fornite has dedicated servers. Warframe should get some eventually. Soon...

[PublikDomain]

Warframe doesn't have official dedicated servers because there's no reason to. It's just not necessary for the vast majority of sessions, whether that's because lag isn't that big of a deal  in a PvE game or because many sessions run for only a few minutes at a time. We do have dedicated servers where it's necessary for functionality like Relays, and in Conclave where a stable and level playing field actually matters. But Conclave servers are player-run because there's again no reason for DE to host them themselves. Conclave players are a small enough group and are willing to host their own servers, so DE lets them. DE doesn't have to pay a dime.

But 99% of the real problems with P2P comes down to lost rewards, and the only reason they're lost is because of some masochistic idea that failure and bad luck must be punished. Give rewards on abort/disconnect/failure and poof, no more problems.

[Birdframe_Prime]

Warframe doesn't run Dedicated Servers for the same reason that other games do run them: Because the game was originally coded for P2P and has become too large (and needs them to constantly be working on the next thing, whether that's updates, reworks, anything), for them to stop and recode the entire game for that format.

To switch to Dedicated, DE would literally have to stop production on all current and future updates (in order to not be constantly moving their goalposts), and then invest into the Dedicated Server format, taking up to a year out of their production cycle, just to get the game into the state it is now with the Dedicated Server base. 

At the other side of things, Dedicated Servers do not come without their own drawbacks, like the simple one of spending hours not being able to log in to the Server every time there's a new full Update. Getting kicked from all games immediately when there's a patch of any kind.

It would also require re-acquiring licensing for their deals with Xbox, Playstation and Nintendo, on top of completely halting the process of that 'mobile' release they showcased a while back.

It's not quick, it's not simple, it costs more money than fixing the P2P system does, and it would put off any updates that we (the players) want for up to a year, killing DE's revenue so that they find it even harder to recover from the costs of the change-over.

[bad4youLT]

Because servers cost money and p2p is good way to cut down the costs

Also something that works in one game may not work in other game 

[Voltage]

10 hours ago, trst said:

Meanwhile a co-op game doesn't have such a thing as "host advantage".

Nova's Wormhole literally requires casting speed (Archon Shards or Natural Talent) when a client.

I just wanted to point this out. The rest of your post makes sense though. Warframe doesn't need dedicated servers, it needs better customer service and securities for mission abandonment situations.

[(PSN)Ember_Shade_Rose]

11 hours ago, (PSN)jaggerwanderer said:

Epic Games owns Warframe now. If Fornite has dedicated servers. Warframe should get some eventually. Soon...

Epic games doesn't own Warframe.

[(PSN)ARC_Paroe]

On 2023-05-26 at 7:52 PM, Cerikus said:

Because of the reality of game development. 

When DE decided to make Warframe all publishers turned them down, so they had to publish it themselves. It was basically "we can make this work" or "company goes bankrupt". Because of that it was impossible for them to host their own servers (no money), so they built the game on a P2P architecture. To change it now would require a complete rework of 10 old netcode and all the layers of changes over the years.

This actually isnt true, and you can do dedicated servers pretty easily in a P2P instance (the "host" is always the server, and the server can "host" multiple sessions). 
But also we dont need proper dedicated servers for ALL instances, rather, we need public world sessions to be hosted by them because the issue with host migration applies almost exclusively to the sandbox areas and steel path circuit.

[Birdframe_Prime]

On 2023-05-27 at 7:34 AM, (PSN)jaggerwanderer said:

Epic Games owns Warframe now. If Fornite has dedicated servers. Warframe should get some eventually. Soon...

I think you mean TenCent. And no, they don't 'own' Digital Extremes, but they do have a hefty chunk of investment. That's why they previewed 'Warframe Mobile', for the Chinese mobile market.

13 hours ago, (PSN)ARC_Paroe said:

This actually isnt true, and you can do dedicated servers pretty easily in a P2P instance (the "host" is always the server, and the server can "host" multiple sessions). 

Fun fact? DE already do this for the Social Hubs and there are players that host dedicated servers for Conclave.

The problem is that this is specifically not what the thread is about.

The thread is about moving the entire game to Dedicated, owned-by-DE, servers that host all games. Why? Because they are tired of host disconnections. What's wrong with that? Players still can, do, and frequently complain about, matchmaking troubles when they're on Dedicated Servers too. And a slew of other problems with them on top that are different problems from the ones we have on P2P.

[SastusBulbas]

An absolute farce of a day playing on Fortuna trying to get Atmos systems and sick of it. DE have no interest in improving the player experience, money, thats DE.

 

The farm is a joke, its why so many leave never to return. Many who leave despite years of fanboi cultism will usually do a complete 180 and say straight the game sucked, was a massive life suck and the pricing in game was ludicrus, dozens of players I know in real life via family and friend connec tions all hate this game and continually ask why the hell does anyone play it.

 

It is even worse on platform, Xbox is a complete screw your day over experience due to the ultra selfish screw anyone else player community who will speed run relic runs and extract before anyone gets reactant, and that simply shows how hard DE sucks when a player presses a mission and ends up in a mission when the host is already at the extraction point.

 

I'm playing PC today, I am getting into missions that are over before the lift door opens, some I get no reward, some bug out, some players are doing thermia instead of the bounty, but very often its players getting dumped into missions that are running with that variable connections with other players.

 

So paying players are getting screwed over with this appaling absolute nonsense p2p crap. My experience is crap, my family all quit due to the crap and I am in here venting due to a complete wasted day farming Atmos and getting no Atmos whil econtinually being disconnected and thrown into missions that are already complete. Its a farce.

 

[trst]

3 hours ago, SastusBulbas said:

An absolute farce of a day playing on Fortuna trying to get Atmos systems and sick of it. DE have no interest in improving the player experience, money, thats DE.

 

The farm is a joke, its why so many leave never to return. Many who leave despite years of fanboi cultism will usually do a complete 180 and say straight the game sucked, was a massive life suck and the pricing in game was ludicrus, dozens of players I know in real life via family and friend connec tions all hate this game and continually ask why the hell does anyone play it.

 

It is even worse on platform, Xbox is a complete screw your day over experience due to the ultra selfish screw anyone else player community who will speed run relic runs and extract before anyone gets reactant, and that simply shows how hard DE sucks when a player presses a mission and ends up in a mission when the host is already at the extraction point.

 

I'm playing PC today, I am getting into missions that are over before the lift door opens, some I get no reward, some bug out, some players are doing thermia instead of the bounty, but very often its players getting dumped into missions that are running with that variable connections with other players.

 

So paying players are getting screwed over with this appaling absolute nonsense p2p crap. My experience is crap, my family all quit due to the crap and I am in here venting due to a complete wasted day farming Atmos and getting no Atmos whil econtinually being disconnected and thrown into missions that are already complete. Its a farce.

 

What does any of that have to do with P2P vs dedicated connections?

The effort required to farm a certain resource has nothing to do with connection. Players being selfish has nothing to do with connection. Being matchmade with a "completed" mission has nothing to do with connection. And loading in slow enough for others to finish the mission has nothing to do with connection (older gen consoles have this issue especially entirely due to their obsolete hardware).

And if anything loading speed issues could be made worse by dedicated servers depending on how far you are from the nearest server.

[Cerikus]

4 hours ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

What's wrong with that?

Nothing is wrong with that and I am sure there is no one here or at DE that would disagree. It's all about the manpower necessary to actually implement it.

Transition from P2P to Dedicated would require the people working on CrossPlay/CrossSave/CrossTrade and the people who work on netcode for new updates to stop. Do we want that?

It's not about money. It's not about "it is simple, because I think it is".

It's about time and workforce.

[(XBOX)ECCHO SIERRA]

On 2023-05-26 at 7:18 PM, GoldenToad said:

Why is it 10 years later we're still running on a peer-to-peer hosting service?

Let me put the situation into perspective for you guys:

Dead by Daylight only has around 40,000 - 50,000 active players during peak hours each day.

Warframe boasts around 60,000 to 80,000 active players during peak hours each day.

 

Fun Fact: Both are owned by companies based in Canada!

 

Dead by Daylight has a net worth just shy of $1M USD and makes around $230k USD per year.

Warframe makes around $175M USD per year.

 

Dead by Daylight has Dedicated Servers for their game.

Warframe does not.

 

Why is this. "It's not a pvp game" is irrelevant, host migration is one of the largest gripes people have about the game. It causes so many issues such as Lost Progress because the host's computer crashed and the data on their internal server was never sent to the other people in the session. Sure, sometimes you get your materials back if it sync'd in time but more often than not that does not happen- you just lose your progression and loot.

It's not like buying servers would make Warframe go broke- they make 760x higher revenue than Dead by Daylight yet DBD has servers while Warframe does not.

 

Dead by Daylight has similar active player numbers as Warframe too so there is no excuse.

Dead by Daylight makes the same amount as 2-3 households put together per year. If the average household income was 76k USD per year.

Warframe makes as much as 2,302 households. That's large enough to be its own village.

Ah yes another one of these threads.

[Birdframe_Prime]

13 minutes ago, Cerikus said:

Nothing is wrong with that

Hmmm... I specifically stated something that is wrong with that.

Dedicated Servers have their own problems, ranging from the simple ones like 'not everywhere can have servers near them, so there are plenty of areas in the world where their local server has consistent pings of up to 200', to the more esoteric ones like 'P2P currently allows players to continue in their games while an update happens, as long as they don't extract during the update process, and even stay in the menus after the update for a generous length of time, while any update to the game on a dedicated server simply kicks players out at the specified time of update and does not allow you to finish anything'.

I also, very, very specifically because it's one of the biggest problems with dedicated servers for games like Final Fantasy, WoW, Diablo and Overwatch, do not want to start getting locked out of servers on large update days due to player saturation causing massive queues to log in.

Now, let me be clear, these are not any greater or lesser (in the grand scheme of things) than the problems we have with P2P.

They are, however, additional reasons beyond time and manpower that would convince a developer to not make the switch over.

19 minutes ago, Cerikus said:

It's not about money.

And I'm going to semantics you here: It is.

Because time and manpower both literally cost money. And they're also, very clearly, a loss of more money due to the task taking away from the things that earn money.

On the other hand, you're absolutely right.

It's definitely a case of players thinking 'It must be simple' and not understanding just how much time and effort this will take.

The economic factors are based on that time and effort, and the rewards for all of that time, effort and loss of revenue is... a game that's got some of the same and many completely new problems with it.

In any situation, the gain for the company has to be measured alongside the gain for the players.

When the gain for the players is... approximately net-zero, because of all the things I stated in an earlier comment on the thread, and the gain for the company is a loss in time, revenue and player base (due to the time), then it's simply never going to be worth the change over.

[Mieo_Mio]

Ripped from Reddit: (on costs / reality of dedicated servers.)

The cost can vary a lot, and it also depends on how it's done.

If you host the servers "in house," then you're responsible for buying and maintaining the machines. That means hardware, backbone connections, bandwidth, support team, repair costs, electricity, etc.

There's also the matter of having multiple connections to internet providers (we're talking backbone providers like Level 3 and Cogent, not last-mile providers like Comcast or Time Warner) in case one of them goes out or a line gets cut. Backup power in case of public power loss. And multiple physical locations around the globe to host local servers so everyone can play with a reasonable ping.

Then there's the option of paying someone else to manage all of that and just rent a group of servers from various locations.

I rent a cheap server from a colocation facility (~USD$66/month, paid annually), and I can host three maybe four copies of a Killing Floor server on it. Depending on how a game and server is made, a single machine could host many more.

Thus, renting a quality server costs a thousand a year or more, depending on the quality of the server. And usually has a "startup cost" because they have to buy the hardware and don't want you renting it for one month and dropping it, sticking them with the hardware cost.

Let's say a USD$1500/year server can host 12 copies of a game server. Steam Stats http://store.steampowered.com/stats says there are about 7000 people playing Evolve right now. Five players a game, that's 1400 copies that need hosting. 12 copies per machine, that's about 115 servers. At L$1500/yr, that's $172,500 per year. Plus any fees (generally several hundred each) for renting a new server. And it's likely they need to keep more than that available so people can still play at peak hours, even though in the off hours and a month from now that number of servers required is gonna go down.

It's likely if you're renting that many servers you can get some sort of deal from the colocation agency. But still, it's a lot of money.

This is why several games take the "free dedicated server" approach. Anyone can download the dedicated server code -- it doesn't have any game assets like sounds, models, etc included anyway -- and then host the game themselves. Killing Floor right now has thousands of servers online, none of them (or maybe just a couple? I dunno) hosted by Tripwire. It also has the ability to do a "listen server," so someone can start up their own local server that only runs while they're playing the game.

Anyway, a more reasonable development solution, because it takes less development time and is compatible with consoles, is to have ONLY listen servers, and then only maintain a "master server" that helps point people trying to join at the people hosting. Which is why you see that a whole lot more lately than things like dedicated servers.

Having a developer or more likely a development team build and maintain a dedicated server package for a game costs time and money to create and is then given away for free. In this age of DLC, it can be hard for corporate to see the logic in that.