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Comment by imtringued | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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