Thoughts about PeerToPeer (P2P)

[Norway174]

Reading over the FAQ, and talking with some people on Discord.

I recently learned the game will feature P2P communication.

As we've learnt with previous games, such as GTA V. Which also use P2P.

Is that it's not secure.

Has there been any thoughts about cheating? And any measures put in place to prevent it?
Rule 1 of online games is to never, ever trust the client.

And P2P is inherently flawed in that logic, in that you have to trust the client. Unless you do the same calculations on the server as well, to verify the client is correct. But at that point, you're doing double the work, for no gain. And those resources on the client could be better put to use doing something else.

Or maybe it's being used for something else, like predicting movement. With the server verifying the location, to prevent one player from jumping around in a dog fight?

Any comment on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

 

[Zijkhal]

Starbase will not be pure P2P, but a hybrid, with "Persistence, security, matchmaking" (and maybe some other stuff as well) handled server side. Devs were pretty adamant on doing their best to prevent cheaters, but, obviously, we wont get any details on the anticheat methods.

Still, I do believe that there are ways to make cheating pretty difficult even in a P2P environment, but I am very far from an expert in the field.

 

[Norway174]

Starbase will not be pure P2P, but a hybrid,

I mean, yeah... I'm fully aware it won't be pure P2P.

I'm just hoping for more details about what exactly would be P2P.

For example, someone mentioned, simulation. That'd you'd simulate your own ship.
And that, to me at least, seems like it'd be nearly impossible to create an effective anti-cheat for. Unless you were to do the same simulations on the server, to verify the client isn't doing anything wrong.

Like, not simulating damage. Making your ship invincible. For example.

That's what has me the most worried.

And I really hope they aren't going to add some sort of super intrusive, and borderline illegal anti-cheat software either, like Xingcode or whatever it was called. Black Desert Online uses it at least. And it's terrible.

It's literally a keylogger and file searcher. Sending all that information over the internet to their servers.
And that's just not something I'm okay with.

But I'm not worried about Frozebyte adding something like that. They seem too nice for that.
I'm just worried they aren't going to be able to deal with cheaters, if it does become an issue. Like what happened in GTA V Online.

 

[Feros_MK1]

I have bad memories about peer to peer, since it is very easy to ddos anyone you play with/against.
A game i really liked (in the past) just got runed by that in therms of PVP.

In my case it was Destiny 2 and in my experience P2P was okay in regular gameplay (PVE) but performed very awful in competitive gameplay.
I played it alot by myself and since my personal endgame is PVP, P2P was not an option in the end.

People tryed to get the most rare item rewards in PVP and could not get it because they had to win 7 games in a row in order to finish this challange.
If you leave within the match, it counts as a loss and if you get ddos'ed, you will get a high ping and getting thrown out of the game, wich also counts as a loss.

You can easly abuse this system by slowing down your own connection. If your ping is low enouth, you can just shoot other players and they cant even hit/see you because you are lagging so hard.

Also the abuser would not be kicked because the ping was to low to be kicked.

After this experience this game was runed for me in terms of PVP and the most of the PVP oriented players of the clan i was in also left a short time they're realised, they getting ddos'ed and could not do anything against it.

Im pretty sure this wouldnt be happen if the developers decided to implement dedicated servers.


As an developer you have to deal almost always in any game with cheaters, ppl who abusing a bug and so on.
But you can make it worse by using the an vulnerable structure such as the server envoyement in Destiny 2.

Im still hyped for Starbase and my focus isnt on PVP in this game, i just wanted to share my experince with you about Peer 2 Peer.

Its okay for PVE but i would not recommend it in general.

 

[Norway174]

Bump. Any chance we could get an official response to this? Or an updated FAQ with more information? Thanks!

 

[FranklinZ]

Yeah that problem is hard.
In matchmaking games, it's just the mach, but in a MMO, damage is done to other players even after banning the cheater.
I can see people loosing their account and money but not care because they pleased their real life boss while cheating.

 

[Cannon Machine Ballista]

Yeah that problem is hard.
In matchmaking games, it's just the mach, but in a MMO, damage is done to other players even after banning the cheater.
I can see people loosing their account and money but not care because they pleased their real life boss while cheating.

I hope that the rich and complicated gameplay and mechanisms can suppress plug-in scripts and cheats.

 

[Kane Hart]

So Lauri talked about this before and some depth. The way they were planning or it sounded like might be in the game is some sort of calculation check system where can happen with other clients around or server side, etc. It sounds like the P2P goes through validation and checks, etc. The idea because of the style of game is to help offload more to the client in other ways like Physic calculation, some the extra bandwidth, etc.

But it also had a lot on the checks, calculations, cheat checking, you name it.

It's not going be like other games we seen where it was done as a easy way out rather they did it in a very elaborate and complex setting.

I think this also helps performance of course if you live on the other side the planets with the players you play with you might feel it more, but than again you might actually feel it less as you might get a better direct route, etc.

Either way the system is very very complex hopefully someone else might be able to answer more for you, but it's very in depth system even talked about the idea of running dedicated servers (as the players) to run stations, and other assets and such or another kind of system.

I'm looking forward to it honestly.

 

[Dante]

So Lauri talked about this before and some depth. The way they were planning or it sounded like might be in the game is some sort of calculation check system where can happen with other clients around or server side, etc. It sounds like the P2P goes through validation and checks, etc. The idea because of the style of game is to help offload more to the client in other ways like Physic calculation, some the extra bandwidth, etc.

But it also had a lot on the checks, calculations, cheat checking, you name it.

It's not going be like other games we seen where it was done as a easy way out rather they did it in a very elaborate and complex setting.

I think this also helps performance of course if you live on the other side the planets with the players you play with you might feel it more, but than again you might actually feel it less as you might get a better direct route, etc.

Either way the system is very very complex hopefully someone else might be able to answer more for you, but it's very in depth system even talked about the idea of running dedicated servers (as the players) to run stations, and other assets and such or another kind of system.

I'm looking forward to it honestly.

Thank for the clarification. That's sounds good for me. Sure, pure Server sided would be better, but it also costs a lot. As long this works, everything should be fine

 

[Brushes]

Bound to be at least one in alpha that can tell us how well it really works...

 

[Feros_MK1]

Its been a wile since the last time somebody talked about pvp.

A goog example why you should't use peer to peer is a part of the famous Youtuber Kenator.

We are far away from this point.

But imagine your in the middle of a big fight on your ship. (with you and your friends)

You just have to ddos the commander (or he has a bad connection in general ) and the battle would be pretty much over.

Another good example why you should not go for peer to peer.

Peer to peer is bad.

 

[Cavilier210]

Its been a wile since the last time somebody talked about pvp.

A goog example why you should't use peer to peer is a part of the famous Youtuber Kenator.

We are far away from this point.

But imagine your in the middle of a big fight on your ship. (with you and your friends)

You just have to ddos the commander (or he has a bad connection in general ) and the battle would be pretty much over.

Another good example why you should not go for peer to peer.

Peer to peer is bad.

Only parts are peer to peer. Other parts are to the server. How its handled and which parts go where are not public knowledge.

 

[Feros_MK1]

Only parts are peer to peer. Other parts are to the server. How its handled and which parts go where are not public knowledge.

Even if there are only parts of peer to peer, its an unnecessary increase of delay and i dont think frostbite will reinvent the wheel here.

Anyone whos familiar just a bit knows, that peer to peer leets to many problems and im pretty sure, this will lead to problems here too.

 

[Cavilier210]

Even if there are only parts of peer to peer, its an unnecessary increase of delay and i dont think frostbite will reinvent the wheel here.

Anyone whos familiar just a bit knows, that peer to peer leets to many problems and im pretty sure, this will lead to problems here too.

P2P is a faster connection and lower delay. Thats why they're using it in the first place. Its also why other games use it.

 

[Feros_MK1]

P2P is a faster connection and lower delay. Thats why they're using it in the first place. Its also why other games use it.

You should test a game which uses P2P.
It works pretty good as long as your connection is allright. But once your latency is very high, it starts to lag. For some reason you gain in PVP unfair advantages because of it.

If youre not able to understand P2P in genereal, (and why you should not use it), heres a very easy video which even you should understand.

Starbase will be vulnerable to ddos attacks and i can bet for it ppl will realize the weakness of this system.

If you wan't we can talk afterwords (if the game has a final release) to prove I was right. (And i never where wrong with this thought. P2P is bad in terms of PVP. And if a developer decides to implement PVP, they should not use it.)

 

[Cavilier210]

This is a Hybrid model. Hybrid in order to avert the issues you're explaining there.

 

[dusty]

I can understand wanting to know more about the system, but Starbase's complex simulation cannot realistically run on anything besides the peer-to-peer model that they're utilizing.

 

[Musclethorpe]

I can understand wanting to know more about the system, but Starbase's complex simulation cannot realistically run on anything besides the peer-to-peer model that they're utilizing.

Here is my question. When it comes to PvP, if some one were to simply pull the plug, what becomes of their assets? Do they continue to persist in-game?

 

[dusty]

Everything persists when the player goes offline, though it will stop being simulated; that is, ship flight, YOLOL, etcetera, all stops when the host of those objects disconnects, but the objects themselves remain.

As for the earlier concerns about P2P vulnerability and DDOSing: it's been mentioned that the P2P model in Starbase leverages Steam's network to utilize their bandwidth and connection speeds, which comes with the added benefit of masking player IPs.

 

[Musclethorpe]

Everything persists when the player goes offline, though it will stop being simulated; that is, ship flight, YOLOL, etcetera, all stops when the host of those objects disconnects, but the objects themselves remain.

As for the earlier concerns about P2P vulnerability and DDOSing: it's been mentioned that the P2P model in Starbase leverages Steam's network to utilize their bandwidth and connection speeds, which comes with the added benefit of masking player IPs.

I suppose my specific question is, can those non-simulated objects still be interacted with/destroyed?