Hacker News Reader

I think stop paying attention to the hate is the best thing to do. There is a mindset right now to think of these problems as completely technical ones, I.e. “it’s easy to do server validation and anyone who doesn’t do it is a dumbass”, but there are very real limitations in regards to money and time.

It’s like some engineers are forgetting that most problems faced when programming are not technical.

I started my career developing on a real time OS, learning from people in industry for 20-30 years. I’ve since transitioned you something “higher level” and more web/server focused and a lot of the foo spat out like this is complete BS.

When developing on a real-time OS the only problems I faced was a simple product story (we are building this to solve X problem), and a simple technical problem (build a system which uses under 1% CPU to do X).

When developing these other products though suddenly there are many other considerations to take into place. I appreciate that you bring up latency concerns in multiplayer games, it can be the biggest downer to play a competitive FPS game where players have wildly different pings.

There is truth that we’ve coded ourselves into a corner of complexity and that we there are much efficiency gains to have in terms of output and program efficiency. But it’s willful ignorance to think that is the only problem or that it is trivial to solve, or even that the people involved in a project don’t think about this all the time.

>I'm so utterly and completely burned out by being "a patronising and evil" presence when I make the mistake of trying to actually confer real information to people.

Step down from your high horse. You're just parroting PR talking points that are totally nonsensical. If game studios could save money by offering dedicated servers they would do it. They switched to official servers not because they care about the experience but because it allowed them to monetize online play better. You can't sell hats when players can host their own servers and mod it however they wish. Why would I buy a hat from Infinity Ward when I can just mod myself a hat on my dedicated server?

>If it's dedicated servers that you rent from us as a company then: it can be expensive for you, if it's too expensive, less people do it, less people do it, the more expensive it becomes to maintain the provisioning/admin tools and it's amortised across much less players so the price goes _even higher_.

Again, if it were possible for game studios to make more money by offering dedicated servers, they would do it. You are inventing problems with dedicated servers so that you can ride in and be the hero when you solve them. These aren't actual, real, problems. These are just PR talking points to justify forcing official servers so that game studio have better monetization paths.

>As I've stated repeatedly in this thread: Self-hosting servers only works for session based games.

No, it doesn't. That is a limitation you (game studios) have invented. There are dedicated servers for World of Warcraft.

>But you don't want what you think you want and I'm not trying to patronise you by saying that.

Ah yes the ole "I know best." The final landing spot of ridiculous arguments.

> These aren't actual, real, problems.

Well, "our investors demand more monetization then what's possible when first-party servers don't have a monopoly" is a actual, real, problem; the problem is that the investors have too much control over the software design.

> There are dedicated servers for World of Warcraft.

There were dedicated (third-party, ie potentially self-hosted) servers; last I checked (when I wanted to give WoW another try) Blizzard has been agressively C&Ding them whenever it can.

Servers still exist. Its only servers that were raising money (even to just cover the costs), that were threatened with lawsuit.

Citation? I was specifically looking for a server to run locally (ie on the same physical machine as the client), and nothing turned up.

I was indifferent about you until this post. While I appreciated the information you are giving "from the other side", I also understand why simply telling us this wont make you look any better.

But then you present us that the reason for only official servers is because community servers might have mods/weird rules, or ,dear god, funny names? How exactly is that a problem? Currently I spend some time in Rust. It has official servers as well as community ones. And let me tell you, the community servers are whats keeping the game afloat. Funny names in server list virtually doesn't exist. Its like people in general have a certain level of taste and it just so happens that servers with cringe names are left empty. Mods are great. Different people enjoy different mechanics, and thank god for different rules on some server, like "solo only", because it's actively sought out by people that don't want to combat 20 men teams on official servers.

Your statement that community servers are only working for session based games couldn't be more diverged from reality. Some of those servers are hosted for years continuously, only restarted to apply updates. And for many other games this is the case.

You say that we don't want what we want and Hardcore PC Master Race ain't representing all gamers, but frankly, if anyone knows what they want, wouldn't you agree Hardcore PC gave it more thought than your "average gamer"?

The issues you described ain't problem of community, which you heroically solve by taking our toys away, but are exaggerated, misunderstood, almost nonexistent issues that mainly come from skewed views of you as game developers and yours personally.

Maybe you are burned out of people hating while proclaiming "Im only the messenger" because it touches you personally, correctly, because you also believe the wrong message we Hardcore PC Master Race gamers so hate to hear.

EDIT: And the fact that multiplayer game becomes unprofitable once player spends more time in it is horrifying. So you telling me the studios are actually incentivized to make games we stop playing almost immediately after purchase? And you use this to defend your point why servers cant afford basic anti-cheat?

Nothing can explain it to you like experience. It's nice to be principled and see the world as black and white, but the overall theme I was trying to portray was that everything is trade-offs.

You can't have your cake and eat it too here, everything costs, and player experience is king.

Cheating happens, we don't want it to, but we do the best we can with what we have, and if it's not enough: play on a platform that does not allow memory modification and injection. It's damn impossible to "secure" a client, and when we do people cry about DRM. (I'm not saying that some DRM isn't to "prevent piracy" and I'm a free software advocate so I hate DRM, I'm just saying that if we included DRM in our game people would go nuts about it- but it would help solve the issue here).

AAA titles get hundreds of millions of dollars of development effort, and they can't even bother do basic things for the community and instead thwart community efforts. The problem is that the studios have been bought up by corrupt corporate bean counters who just see video games as a product to sell and not a passion they share in. Educated consumers are the bane of sleazy businessmen, and the salvation of honest ones.

It's sad that you think we're "out to get you", we're just making games.

Consider the widely acknowledged fact tat the working hours are brutal, the pay is quite low for C/C++ programmers, the average experience in the industry before burnout is 5 years.

Nobody would do this if the passion wasn't there. This industry basically couldn't exist without the passion for making games.

And, every time we fail we're yelled at for being incompetent. Every trade off we make is derided by people who never actually tried to make something like this.

Every time we try to increase the amount we're paid, or set a decent working schedule (longer development times mean more salaries because working on a project longer) we're told that we're "sleazy business men" trying to make a profit.

Like I said in another comment, the only way for you to get "better" games is to set your expectations for games lower than AAA (IE: stop buying AAA's), make us slaves or pay more.

And people (in aggregate) do not want to pay more.

> Every time we try to increase the amount we're paid, or set a decent working schedule (longer development times mean more salaries because working on a project longer) we're told that we're "sleazy business men" trying to make a profit.

Who's this "we"? The workers or the shareholders? Is there any unionizing effort on the videogame industry?

There is no need to secure the client because all the things the cheaters can mess with should be server side to begin with. DRM doesn't solve the problem. It only makes the problem more attractive because it lets you avoid the real solution. The end result is buggier games because the project manager can get away with shipping half assed crap.

I'm saying the trade-offs we make are known. It's impossible to do everything. If we could do what you want us to do on the server the game would be 1/10th of what it is because each frame would take 2 seconds to render otherwise.

But, I’m hiring. If you think you can do better. I’ll put in a good word.

https://www.massive.se/job/gameplay-programmer-7439997104051...

https://www.massive.se/job/senior-system-programmer-74399969...

Action games can't be server side fully. Latency would make the game unworkable. So you'll get wall hacks and speed hackers, and aim bots, and trigger bots. You can ban them post facto but its a continual cat and mouse game with detection and avoidance.

Just as a small side note:

I still play some Battlefield 4 from time to time. Custom servers are awful.

You'll randomly get kicked because you didn't pay for a VIP slot, randomly killed because only 5 snipers per team are allowed and randomly kicked because the admin didn't like the particular gun you're using.

I can see why game developers would (and should) prevent that.

If i remember correctly BF4 follows the same logic of BF3, meaning that "Custom" servers are actually running only on hostings that EA has given license to, so at best the administrator has the ability to manage the players and not the game itself.

The only thing that may dissuade game creators from creating openly available dedicated server software is that they will need to let everyone access the list of servers(like Valve), so they would get traffic without any kind of ROI.

Interestingly I have the opposite experience with the previous battlefield 3. There are still several active servers, all of them are generally fun to play with no weird rule sets. I remember in the earlier years of the game some servers had rules like no sniper and you were automatically kicked if using one but that was made clear in the server title.

> almost no cross platform games from 2008 were heavily networked.

Aren't you forgetting something? Like every MMORPG in existence? Almost every player hosted multiplayer game like Warcraft 3 that were released in 2002? (the host can cheat because he is running the server but the other clients can't which is the important part)

Seriously. I don't understand how hard it is to just run the security sensitive parts on the server. It's not like running things on the client removes the need to communicate with a server. The amount of time the hacky solution wastes is significantly worse than doing it correctly and kills the game when it finally launches.

If you want to know more about the server performance situation I recommend watching a video[0] about the subject from our lead gameplay programmer.

I'm getting very tired, and irritated so my responses are coming off as unreasonable now, so with a final hopeful breath let me say the following: I hear what you're saying.

Truly I understand that you think that it's super easy and we have so much money that it should be solved.

We don't have the money you think we do, we run on very thin margins, in both time and resources.

Others have mentioned that we should shift the burden of running servers to users, but that has many tradeoffs and doesn't work for many games- especially not on consoles. Especially not in the sheer numbers of users we have.

The issue is also understanding what 'security sensitive parts' are, because what is that? Everything is sensitive, movement, bullets, health, what you see, what you hear, what you can interact with, what loot you picked up, what gun you have equipped and how fast it's equipped, how fast you reload, how many bullets are in the clip.

If you were to stall a client so that the server verified you could do those things then your game is running 1 frame every 20 seconds. That's even if you had infinite performance on the server to make those calculations for the 24 players that can see each other.

It's a hard problem, one I genuinely invite you to solve for yourself, maybe the answer is to make much simpler games like CS:GO or Minecraft.

Or maybe the answer is simple and everyone I work with, both in my office and in the industry of AAA gaming, is malignantly incompetent like the commenters here keep suggesting.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6Ex29gzqgc

Something positive :-)

As a relative novice when it comes to multiplayer game programming, your comments have been enlightening to me.

I’ve grown my experience over the years in other fields to a point where “don’t trust the client” is nearly second nature to me. So whenever I’d dip my toes into programming a game, and look at multiplayer server side stuff with puzzlement, trying in vain to work our where or how I’m supposed to be validating the legitimacy of the clients incoming game events. It never before occurred to me that doing this kind of server side validation might be too burdensome. The notion that the backend code I was trying to understand had been written with minimising cost per player hour as a positive metric is now so face-palmingly obvious that I am still stunned at how I never realised and literally having a string of “oh and that’s why that bit there..,” as I write this.

So thank you very much for your comments.

I was always curious if a p2p hosted game with host log shipping to a "validation" server would work for a game. People could run a tournament but validation servers would reject or accept a game. Not sure if humans would go for that. Maybe if the game was super up front about it.

You skipped few of the most played multiplayer games of 2008. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, 'top-selling game worldwide for 2007', 7 million units moved in a year. Then there was 2008 Call of Duty: World at War. I stopped following cod soon after (life), but looking further to 2011 Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, again top seller, also shipped with dedicated servers support.

Turns out you can have AAA with dedicated servers as long as you arent planning to nickle and dime your userbase selling macrotransaction first day DLCs or pretend your limited instancing game is an MMO.

> I've been in the industry 6 years

I think this explains why you are having trouble understanding the users point.

I was playing games like Half-Life off of user provided servers in 1998 and can't recall ever having any issues. Others on here seem to have fond memories of doing the same with other games.

> Even then, those sessions can leave players with a very mixed experience (weird rules, mods, someone might have made themselves "god", it opens up the client to be exploited by the server).

This is an odd concern to bring up considering the linked article.