Player Session Hosting Is A Big Nono.

[InForWar]

I'm more than convinced that everyone knows what i'm talking about, when you join a battle and it says migrating hosts.... if you don't know - basically the player who creates the session is holding all the players on his internet and they are completely dependant on him.

 

Now.... here's the problem.

 

As you might know NOT everyone has a superb internet capable of holding multiple connections and actually work properly to sustain a good latency. 

Rather rarely i get guys with low latency to me and i am actually capable of playing properly when my hits actually do register after 100 ms and not 2 seconds.

 

Of course the host has no issues because his latency to the session is 1 ms and he's the one doing the most kills and the only one ACTUALLY capable of playing properly.

I get too often games with over 1k ms somehow even though i set it to be 300 ms max - shows the latency limit is not working at all, and quite frankly if it had worked i would get 1/10 the games i would right now, because to be honest most people have bad internet. I myself have a 40mb/s bandwidth and am capable of holding such connections but most people have 10 and lower and are NOT capable of holding such connections properly. 

 

Solution - not so simple.

 

Well... there's really one solution to fix two problems. the first problem it'l fix is the lack of players cut off by latency limit

and the fact that it lags like unplayably bad on a lot of hosters.

That solution would be: the game would have servers to actually host the sessions, like EVERY other good game (except counter strike :D) and would actually make it so much easier. and the game performance will rise.

 

We need a stable server to host our games because we cannot rely on users, simply because most of their internets suck.

Edited June 16, 2014 by InForWar

[Letter13]

We need a stable server to host our games because we cannot rely on users, simply because most of their internets suck.

Servers are costly though. And I'd rather have Warframe remain free to play.

 

If you're suffering that bad of lag, have you checked your region settings? I rarely have any lag issues when I play online. Every so often I do, but not to the scale you're describing.

[InForWar]

Servers are costly though. And I'd rather have Warframe remain free to play.

But they do make money.

[Letter13]

But they do make money.

I know that DE is making money. But bringing on dedicated servers would drastically increase the cost of development; they'd have to deploy servers around the world in order to get it working properly. That's roughly 2~3 large server clusters for each region considering how many active players there are.

 

Not to mention a server shortage (more players than servers can provide for) would result in players waiting a significant amount of time for an open/available session on a server (because servers have active connection caps/limits).

 

This translates to huge, HUGE expenses. Either the dev team would have to downsize to make up for the expenses of dedicated servers (less devs working on Warframe = slower development), or DE would have to start charging all players some form of monthly fee to play, like many MMOs do.

[DarthRevan84]

You know they could probly fire half the art staff and not be that much worse off. Ontop of look how many free to play games there already are that have dedicated servers.

[MayPeX]

You know they could probly fire half the art staff and not be that much worse off. Ontop of look how many free to play games there already are that have dedicated servers.

 

Wow?

[Zerohades]

I understand that, but what i don't understand is the way the game "choose" the host. I have a good ping but not a good connnection 6MB/sDL 500KB/sUL,(not even speaking when my wife is looking TV and my daughter using the tablet where it really drops to the ground) and I'm 8/10 hosting the game. Probably because my computer si a rocket launcher from star wars 15. but still people playing with me are lagging because of that so now, when playing with friends I join after they lauch the mission and i Solo the void and the other missions most of the time.

 

Zerohades

[VegetableBasket]

I know that DE is making money. But bringing on dedicated servers would drastically increase the cost of development; they'd have to deploy servers around the world in order to get it working properly. That's roughly 2~3 large server clusters for each region considering how many active players there are.

 

Not to mention a server shortage (more players than servers can provide for) would result in players waiting a significant amount of time for an open/available session on a server (because servers have active connection caps/limits).

 

This translates to huge, HUGE expenses. Either the dev team would have to downsize to make up for the expenses of dedicated servers (less devs working on Warframe = slower development), or DE would have to start charging all players some form of monthly fee to play, like many MMOs do.

 

How is it virtually every other f2p game can afford to be hosted? You didn't factor in that there are a ton of people who can't enjoy the game because of the networking who could actually participate and spend money on it. I have never managed servers for a large online game but I don't think the cost of servers are as prohibitively high as you make them out to be.

Plus they could just have dedicated servers for situations where people can't connect to each other, so for the people who are forced to a strict nat because of their living situation, etc.

 

Plus DE said they bought servers in new york for the hubs, so it looks like they're coming anyways.

Edited June 16, 2014 by VegetableBasket

[StinkyPygmy]

Wow?

I know. Ouch.

 

On topic: While a good idea, DE being a relatively small company (as far as a know) doesn't have the resources to have large servers and keep WF free to play. Maybe in the future, but not at the moment I would venture to guess.

And if WF suddenly became a pay to play game DE would lose a lot of the fanbase. I'd feel kind of betrayed that shelled out for founders etc only to have a consistent cost forced on me when I was led top believe otherwise. 

 

A lot of players that have spent any kind of decent amount of money on the game would likely feel the same way. Chances are a regular monthly thing is not something they can all afford or are willing to pay at least.

 

Probably a thing for the future though.

Edited June 16, 2014 by StinkyPygmy

[Cryp2Nite]

It's not a "latency problem". It's a bandwidth problem. Hosting Defense/Mobile Defense/Survival missions requires at least

1 Mbps upload bandwidth. That's way to much, and very few (speaking about all players, not just the "gamers" with hardcore

rigs and 100 Mbit connections) owns such a connection. And that's probably the reason we will never get dedicated servers,

I doubt DE can afford that much bandwidth. Imagine 3000 people playing a Defense missions, that's roughly a Gigabit traffic!

You could "host" every single human beeing in Europe playing WoW or such, with that traffic - it's ridiculous.

 

And that's the main reason the whole system doesn't work. I highly doubt there is a 3:1 ratio for <1Mbps and >1Mbps

people playing this game. That means that even in theory there aren't enough people with connections capable of hosting

bandwidth intensive missions. That means that most of the "public"/"pug" teams get a lagging host.

 

And De doesn't even give us the tools to handle that mess. The latency setting is just a joke. There is no point for

measuring the latency in the lobby, because every (ok, maybe not every single) connection is able to contact a client with a

decent ping under that condition. But let the game start, let the required bandwidth raise to the point where it reaches

the limit ---> and now look at the latency... It's only useful if someone wanted to join mid-fight, because under that

condition the latency setting is actually significant.

[InForWar]

It's not a "latency problem". It's a bandwidth problem. Hosting Defense/Mobile Defense/Survival missions requires at least

1 Mbps upload bandwidth. That's way to much, and very few (speaking about all players, not just the "gamers" with hardcore

rigs and 100 Mbit connections) owns such a connection. And that's probably the reason we will never get dedicated servers,

I doubt DE can afford that much bandwidth. Imagine 3000 people playing a Defense missions, that's roughly a Gigabit traffic!

You could "host" every single human beeing in Europe playing WoW or such, with that traffic - it's ridiculous.

 

And that's the main reason the whole system doesn't work. I highly doubt there is a 3:1 ratio for <1Mbps and >1Mbps

people playing this game. That means that even in theory there aren't enough people with connections capable of hosting

bandwidth intensive missions. That means that most of the "public"/"pug" teams get a lagging host.

 

And De doesn't even give us the tools to handle that mess. The latency setting is just a joke. There is no point for

measuring the latency in the lobby, because every (ok, maybe not every single) connection is able to contact a client with a

decent ping under that condition. But let the game start, let the required bandwidth raise to the point where it reaches

the limit ---> and now look at the latency... It's only useful if someone wanted to join mid-fight, because under that

condition the latency setting is actually significant.

I assume your point being is that this game is not properly made to be able to be ran by users. it is too heavy as it needs too much information to be to sent rather than just geographical location and where the character is actually facing, i think it sends a lot more unneeded information that can be calculated in the host's computer. 

 

Many other games are well built for that situation, like minecraft or even counterstrike. these are ran quite smoothly without too much bandwidth needed, rather the more ram the better for these because more calculation is done on the host rather on the data transferred.

[Methanoid]

a better solution is for the matchmaking system to group ppl up from the same countys before looking elsewhere, distance between clients/host will be the main factor for "lag", more range = more things to hiccup/go wrong.

 

we already have a region thing for what? chat/matchmaking?  add in a country option as well to enhance matchmaking but not affect chat.

Edited June 16, 2014 by Methanoid

[Cryp2Nite]

distance between clients/host will be the main factor for "lag"

 

No it's not. Did you read my post? I play fine with people all around the world - from central Europe, as long as they don't have

a S#&amp;&#036;ty upstream bandwidth.

[InForWar]

a better solution is for the matchmaking system to group ppl up from the same countys before looking elsewhere, distance between clients/host will be the main factor for "lag", more range = more things to hiccup/go wrong.

 

we already have a region thing for what? chat/matchmaking?  add in a country option as well to enhance matchmaking but not affect chat.

Impossible. i live in israel. you know how many people play this game in israel? almost no one.

[Methanoid]

Impossible. i live in israel. you know how many people play this game in israel? almost no one.

 

thats why i said it should check local to you "first" THEN look elsewhere like it does now.

[Methanoid]

No it's not. Did you read my post? I play fine with people all around the world - from central Europe, as long as they don't have

a S#&$ty upstream bandwidth.

 

how do you know your internet route is perfect to every player youve met in warframe?

 

you do know theres tons of HOPS in your route from you to other people and if just 1 telephone exchange somewhere has issues then that can manifest as "lag" to you and snowballs along your whole route.

 

your route from your home connection to me doesnt follow the same route as everyone else, thsi is why theres no such thing as "my connection is fine" i heard that countless times when i was a server admin for UT99/CS/Q3/SOF2/etc, ive mentioned elsewhere that you should do a traceroute to various places to see if theres issues along your connections route, i believe it helped someone not long ago and their ISP fixed his issue.

 

https://forums.warframe.com/index.php?/topic/242297-content-servers-down-harming-players/#entry2826584

^ dood here posted his issue was fixed, maybe read that whole thread, start to end and see if you have the same issue, its amazingly common and happens all the time, its an unavoidable issue.

 

ive posted similar things in other threads, sorry cant find them tho, im useless at finding old threads on the forums here.

 

in that other thread it shows how to use TRACERT to find issues, if you have issues with friends in warframe, group up with them, enter a game, then open a dos prompt and try "NETSTAT -a -b", look for the processes for warframe, find the IP's displayed (should list your friends IP's, or ask your friends to just tell you their IP's) and TRACERT them to see if theres any connection issues.

Edited June 16, 2014 by Methanoid

[Cryp2Nite]

I didn't say that my (there actually is no "my" in this term) connection routes perfectly to every player. It's the internet...

I just wanted to say that the main reason for this lagging games we all know (floating pickups, hardcore delayed damage...)

is NOT the distance between the client and the host. Everytime you ask a laggy host what type of connection he has,

you get "less than 1Mbps" as answer. I have people from US, Canada, South America, Russia...on my friendlist, and i can

play fine with all of them. Cause they have very capable connections. That doesn't mean there aren't routing problems and

odd hops between the host/client. They are just not the main reason we often have this lags.

 

And if you look at the average connection speed of different countries/on the world - and then take a look at your

resmon/traffic control tool of your choice while hosting a Defense mission on a full team on-load, it's not hard to

imagine that's the main reason for the lag in Warframe.

[grillv20]

Its like people actually think that dedicated servers grow on trees lol. this would not solve problems either btw it would just region lock the crap out of the game for a lot of people. there are people that play in other countries that wouldn't benefit from the servers at all unless they had servers near them. Plus I really doubt the playerbase is even remotely ready for something like this if they were to divide up the playerbase based on region. Take the amount of people you have right now to play it with and divide it by like 2 or 3 and what you're left with is a dead game.

[Methanoid]

I didn't say that my (there actually is no "my" in this term) connection routes perfectly to every player. It's the internet...

I just wanted to say that the main reason for this lagging games we all know (floating pickups, hardcore delayed damage...)

is NOT the distance between the client and the host. Everytime you ask a laggy host what type of connection he has,

you get "less than 1Mbps" as answer. I have people from US, Canada, South America, Russia...on my friendlist, and i can

play fine with all of them. Cause they have very capable connections. That doesn't mean there aren't routing problems and

odd hops between the host/client. They are just not the main reason we often have this lags.

 

And if you look at the average connection speed of different countries/on the world - and then take a look at your

resmon/traffic control tool of your choice while hosting a Defense mission on a full team on-load, it's not hard to

imagine that's the main reason for the lag in Warframe.

 

distance can be a factor, bigtime, more distance is more hops from you to the host, the other 2 clients might be closer and/or have fewer hops from them to the host and suffer no issues at all, then you with your longer route have a bigger risk of getting delays/packetloss/etc.

 

your example isnt a very good one, yeah a bad upload speed could be the issue, or a weak PC/CPU, or overloaded telephone exchanges, high contention ratios/useage at primetime, packetloss along the route, could be allsorts of stuff, you cant narrow it down to a few random questions youve thrown at players in warframe who are probably clueless themselves and guessing.

 

Either way the first thing you should always try is some tracert's to various places/destinations to see if you have issues, what your doing is basically guesswork, go and actually try some simple tests your end if only to eliminate some potential issues.  Your example btw i can still argue the opposite, ive played with some CZ players who i also queried, they (apparantly) had quick enough connections yet 3 of them were fine and i was chundering slow as pigmuck, probably just means somewhere along the route from me to the host i had issues.

 

we should never guess the problem, just try to eliminate as many potential causes as we can, typically for me thats checking my router status, doing some tracert's to various websites and other game servers, running thru ethernet instead of my wifi, try a full reboot, etc etc, plenty of things to try before assuming the worst.

 

also nowadays you cant even tell who the host is when warframe does a host migration all on it own, we cant "fix" lag issues but we could minimise it, which is why i suggested we have an option to set our country of origin, then matchmaking could group us up based on same country, then if the teams still not full look farther afield after that like we do now.  a visual indication of player country on the team UI ingame would also be nice as well as a mark on whos been assigned as host.

[Cryp2Nite]

I'm not "guessing". It's a fact that the vast majority of all internet connections aren't even close to 1 MB/s upload speed.

And it's a fact that bandwidth intensive missions can require a upload speed higher than that.

 

And even if you connect to someone 10k miles away, you'll get a ping way better than 500ms, provided that no odd

routing take place. So it's very unlikely that such an issue is responsible for the standard "all floating in air" games

we experience so often.

 

Play with you neighbour, play with one from your city, from your country, from your mainland... You will have fckin huge

lags if a person with a (lets say) typical 1/2/6 Mbit DSL connection hosts the game. There is no way not to lag with such

a host in Def/MDef/Survival missions. Doesn't matter where they are from. And what does that tell us? It's really obvious...

[Phatose]

So, it would seem the optimal solution would be for DE to revisit the netcode and P2P model they're using, and find a way to drastically reduce the upload overhead. 

[Mak_Gohae]

I have been saying this for a long time, have a 5 bucks a month sub for servers and the rest can play P2P.

It's going to break the population up but now i think there are enough people playing now that this is not going to hurt the game that much. 

[InForWar]

Its like people actually think that dedicated servers grow on trees lol. this would not solve problems either btw it would just region lock the crap out of the game for a lot of people. there are people that play in other countries that wouldn't benefit from the servers at all unless they had servers near them. Plus I really doubt the playerbase is even remotely ready for something like this if they were to divide up the playerbase based on region. Take the amount of people you have right now to play it with and divide it by like 2 or 3 and what you're left with is a dead game.

1) The game is already divided into regions 

2) Servers all over the worlds are pretty much reachable for all players with a max latency of 300 (four times better than what happens here)

3) Dedicated servers aren't made of gold. So cut that crap. if they really wanted to they could afford it without a single problem. it's not like it's a huge WoW server base with 50 servers at all the world regions that they need monthly payment from everyone and btw they do get a lot payment from this platinum.

[InForWar]

Every gaming company that respects itself has proper servers to hold their player base and are not cheaping out on something so important. if they fail to understand that then they have a serious issue. Holding servers are as important as developing the game.

[ziranei]

WF have very bad upload management. It reports every action u make, so if u run in defense over lot ammo packs or shoot many bullets, u upload for every single item and that creates huge traffic. If they can lower bandwidth if uses for hosting, then they can think about their own servers. Most of f2p games are backed up by some bigger companies so they make more than one game and uses finances from all games and very few games are so fast paced.