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Comment by jackmott | Hacker News Reader

The difference is with an authoritative servers many types of cheats become impossible. If the server doesn't broadcast the position of a player when it is impossible to see them, then the client can't hack to get their position. The player cannot cause themselves to move faster than is possible, or grant themselves health or items.

There are still types of cheats that remain possible, like aimbots. Nothing can be done about that.

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> If the server doesn't broadcast the position of a player when it is impossible to see them, then the client can't hack to get their position.

It's peer2peer, there is no server. There's a server for exp, achievements, and loot, but for actual combat and player positions it's all p2p. Your client know the position of everyone else in the PVP arena. Arguably worse is it also knows the IP of everyone else in the PVP arena, so you don't even need to figure out how to crack the game just open wireshark and fire up your DOS attack of choice.

Peer to peer doesn’t mean every player has full knowledge. A perfectly valid implementation is to mark one player as the “host”, meaning they run a fully authoritative sim, and the other players get treated as clients, and treat it as they would a server. Only the host needs full knowledge in that case.

In reverse, a dedicated server doesn’t mean the clients have zero or limited knowledge. A naive dedicated server can simply send all the positions of every player every frame to each of the clients.

Another point is that in a dedicated server environmenr the server has a reliable connection, with semi-predictable performance characteristics, whereas if you’re using a PvP model, you’re at the mercy of the the host clients connection, and their machine performance. On a console the performance isn’t as big a deal but on a PC, the host could be mining bitcoin at the same time, or just running on a potato.

> A perfectly valid implementation is to mark one player as the “host”, meaning they run a fully authoritative sim, and the other players get treated as clients, and treat it as they would a server. Only the host needs full knowledge in that case.

That's still a client/server model rather than a peer to peer model. A major problem with that model regardless of platform is that it's very disruptive when a player drops, as you have a 1/8 chance of losing your host. This is also not D2's model.

> In reverse, a dedicated server doesn’t mean the clients have zero or limited knowledge. A naive dedicated server can simply send all the positions of every player every frame to each of the clients.

Of course not, but it's possible for a dedicated server to restrict the information it sends. It's not really possible for peer to peer to do the same.

>It's peer2peer, there is no server.

I don't think you parsed the conversation correctly.

> It's peer2peer, there is no server.

Unfortunately, in game development community, the term 'peer 2 peer' doesn't in practice have precise meaning, and is applied even where there is some dedicated "host", which may be simply not as authoritative as with traditional client-server model. I have long ago gave up correcting people when they used these words 'incorrectly'.

But with their offline mode they don't have authoritative Servers here so some cheats are inherently possible. Only defense is do be as obscure as possible and hide the important bits in megabytes of fog, aka. a race against the popularity of the game.

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