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JaggedSac on 06 November 2009
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Procrastinato said:
JaggedSac said:
Procrastinato said:

You guys understand that "lack of dedicated servers" doesn't mean "peer-to-peer", right?

It basically means that the "server" will be determined as the group of peers gets together, and will be "traded" to another peer, if the original "server" leaves the game.

This is part if IW's attempt to stop games from ending, just because the server left, which is something of a "cheating" mechanism for people playing on a dedicated host.

This way, yes, there will be a lag advantage, but it will probably be only for the guy who had the best (upload -- i.e. server bandwidth) connection to begin with (i.e. the guy would would have already had the lowest pings), and the rest of the game will be better off for it, because the best, of all players, would be chosen as the server, rather than some guy (who intentionally wants a lag advantage) with a cruddy connection.

Allowing the game to choose who the server is, is probably the best option for everyone playing, on the whole. The one, and only, better option would be to somehow guarantee that the dedicated server had colossal bandwidth -- in other words, was set up by a business, or by the game publisher themselves (like many of EA's games, like BF1943, or BF:BC, which have at least a few "big" dedicated servers, or Sony's games, like Warhawk, MAG, and SOCOM, etc, which are all "big" dedicated servers).

You are describing P2P.  That is exactly how Live/Halo matchmaking works.  Perhaps you are thinking we might be thinking distributed P2P with no single host box?  This P2P that is being talked about is still using the client/server model.  But there is no server involved, just a Peer that is handling all the other Peer's requests.

Okay, I can't let this go.

In a peer-to-peer system, there are NO servers.  Clients are updated AS they receive info from other clients, with no regard to synchronization via a server.  There is no server, so EACH client is authoritative over its representation on remote machines.

There is NO server in a peer-to-peer model.  Don't make me break out the Networking 101 dictionary on you, man.  Get it right.

Ever play Bolo on a Mac?  That's a good example of a peer-to-peer game.  You can't have peer-to-peer and have a server.  If it has a server, it's NOT peer-to-peer.  The matchmaking is done peer-to-peer in games like CoD:MW2.  The GAME is not.

Using "peer-to-peer" to describe CoD:MW or CoD:MW2 is a misnomer, and causes confusion in the discussion.  The real difference between the two is that one allows anyone to set their machine as a host (MW), and the other (MW2) autoselects the host for best network performance, and to recover from the host dropping.  The MW2 model IS better, for all but clan matches set up on machines with a lot of bandwidth -- and its mostly the clan folks... the dedicated players, who are the people that are complaining (of course).

I think using peer to peer to describe any current online game(at least for games with more than 2 players) using your definition would be a falacy.  I don't know of any recent game that does not have one single entity handling the game updates. Perhaps I, and others on the net, was considering the "host" in these situations to be a peer because it was handling both client requests, creating it's own game altering data, and also running the exact same software as the clients.  But, it appears, that you are correct.

I guess the correct terminology for MW2(and most Live games) would be, player hosted matches created using a peer 2 peer matchmaking system.  I will, from now on, use this terminology to describe Live's service.  As it does seem more correct.  No more people bitching about console P2P crap I guess :)