Minimum Requirements For Hosting Public Squads

[Hipolipolopigus]

One of the greatest irritations in joining public squads is people who host the game on a computer from 1995. Your latency limitation can be as strict as is sensible, but you'll still have countless issues; enemies not spawning in a timely fashion, allies and enemies stuttering and loot not falling to the ground, to name a few. However, instead of proposing a complete hosting lock-out for those who have issues running the game in all its glory, I'd like to offer a more interesting idea;

Performance Quotient
This is a system score of 0 to 100 which "judges" your system's hosting capability. Players looking to join public squads would be able to have a "Minimum Performance Quotient" setting, akin to the "Matchmaking Ping Limit" we already have.

Elements to consider for scoring could include;
• Average FPS

   • This should be measured over several missions of different types
• Connection speed
• Packet loss
• WinSAT scores for CPU and DirectX (Implementation snippet here).

TL,DR
A setting which restricts who you will connect to based on their computer's performance and networking, implemented similarly to the current ping restriction system. 

Edited April 26, 2014 by Hipolipolopigus

[Rompido]

has been asked for a long long time now.

[Saenol]

Yeah, a pure ping based match making system doesn't cut it.

 

I have my ping limit set to 200 and was in a game earlier where it took two full minutes for my head to show up, and there was at least 30 seconds of latency for all of my actions. I ended up just spamming my jump attacks until the end of wave 5...at which point the count down timer was counting up and no one could click anything. We were finally saved by a host migration.

 

Host must have been near by for the good ping, but he or she was probably running the game on a Commodore 64 with a 300 baud modem attached to a rotary phone.

 

However, It should be noted that WinSAT scores may not be available or accurate; some other assessment, or simply a polling of hardware, should be considered.

Edited April 27, 2014 by Saenol

[Lorgenz]

this is a valid concern, it should only affect the ability to play the role of hoste however.

[KrazyKrl]

I HIGHLY doubt that it's the specifications of the computer hosting the game that affects the laggyness of games. I think it has more to due with dropped/lost packets and the fact that Warframe just SPAMS data while you are hosting a game. Unless you're running a cable connection that not everyone has, your upstream bandwidth while hosting a game can easily choke on hosting ONLY 3 PEOPLE in Warframe.

 

I posted in another thread about this same issue. Warframe likes to just EAT bandwidth while you're hosting, far beyond what many games take to host 3 people. https://forums.warframe.com/index.php?/topic/185750-netcode/

 

My computer is more than enough to run Warframe. I get 200 FPS if I turn off VSync, and I'm running with everything enabled/highest at 1920x1080; including PhysX, but excluding Motion Blur because Motion Blur sucks.

 

Well, it seems to be intermittent also. But this is pretty standard. I'm not running anything else on my network. 65-70KBps seems to be the average for a 3 client hosted game. Which is near capping my upstream bandwidth.

 

Pink is outbound, blue is inbound, I was hosting 3 people on tier 3 mobile defense (Saryn, Nova, Nyx, and me as Vauban), 1 whole game, and the end of another is shown.

 

 

 

Well, according to the approx bandwidth usage at that point, each line is about 20KBps. The graph autoscales with the max bandwidth used. And you can easily extrapolate it with just one data point, as it is not a logarithmic scale.

Edit: Here's another graph, this one was started on Xini at the very end of wave 1. when someone complained about the lag. The low point between "mountains" 4 and 5 was the wave 5 claim menu. Each grid line on this one is about 25KBps. With the spikes being more than 110KBps, which is about 130% than my connection can handle per second. My connection can support levels around 3 1/2 "grid lines", and is possibly choking during the levels themselves.

The bandwidth displayed is of the column containing the leftmost border of the bandwidth mouseover tooltip, the mouse cursor is not shown in the screenshot.

Edited May 1, 2014 by KrazyKrl

[AnonCat]

Really farking fed up with losing host 30 or 40 waves in and getting kicked. Usually I just quit playing for the rest of the day when that happens. It really kills my will to play at all.

[Saenol]

I HIGHLY doubt that it's the specifications of the computer hosting the game that affects the laggyness of games.

 

Hosting is much more demanding that not hosting, and not simply because of bandwidth/latency/lost packet concerns.

 

If the host cannot run the game at a decent pace, the clients do suffer.

 

I have a solid fiber connection with 40 megabits per second of upload, and I can still occasionally run into issues hosting, even if all clients are near my geographical location with similarly fast connections, especially if I am playing on a slower machine. The performance impact is quite prominent in some levels (GrineeSurvival on Ceres), even on my fastest system (an i7 4930k @ 4.5GHz).

Edited May 7, 2014 by Saenol