Does anyone know if their netcode is TCP instead of UDP? It just seems like they don't want to decide a winner, so everyone loses. And that was one of the reasons they stated they didn't do TCP in PvP during Halo Reach but did for FireFight (prob why FF vs was never a constant thing)

So... any system that is sending real-time data is going to use UDP instead of TCP. This is as true for Destiny/Halo/CoD as it is for a Skype video chat or a VoIP phone call.

The benefit that TCP offers is that it guarantees complete bit-perfect transmission, which is essential for something like serving a web page or downloading an application binary. There is, however, non-trivial overhead involved in the setup, transmission, and teardown of those connections. In TCP, the Source needs to remember what it sent until the Recipient acknowledges that it received those bytes, and if the routing between two hosts is wonky, the server ends up spending a lot of time re-transmitting stuff that it had already sent. This re-transmission can delay new data from being sent immediately, so a few transmission errors can cause a cascade of delays and it can be impossible to catch back up to real-time. In a game, this would be awful.

UDP, on the other hand, does not guarantee packet arrival, instead opting for a quick, "best attempt" transmission. In real-time applications, "old" packets are useless (who needs to know where the enemy was or what someone said 5 seconds ago?!), so it's better to just ship the data and assume that the recipient will receive most of what was sent. Anything that's missing can be "smudged over" with interpolation because it'll be irrelevant after a few seconds anyway.

In short, downloading an OS update to your computer is not time sensitive but does require a 100% bit-perfect transmission, so the overhead that TCP provides is worthwhile. But knowing exactly where the damn Blade Dancer is right now can be critical to the game experience, so TCP overhead can actually cause more problems than it solves for real-time applications, and that's why games and voice chats use UDP. ;-)

That said, there are certainly things I'd expect Destiny to use TCP for (although I have no idea if this is actually true), most notably transactional information from the world server such as loot drops, equipment changes, XP gains, and the like. That's the sort of stuff you want to make sure the server knows about, be it 0.05 or 5 seconds after the fact.

I don't remember Firefight switching the networking code to TCP, but it would make sense in light of the fact that the game was in "lockstep," requiring everyone to pause and re-synchronize when clients fell behind. That sort of thing would be absolutely horrendous in PvP.

Beorn pretty much covered it, but I'd like to add in that the game's communication being synchronous or asynchronous doesn't necessarily mean the transport protocol has to be TCP or UDP. The game itself could be handling synchronization, but still send packets via UDP (at least in theory - I have no idea what it's really doing).

Speaking as someone who has balanced weapons in FPS PvP, I think bungie has been balancing their weapons in exactly the wrong ways.

They seem to come up with base models for each class, balance all of those, and then add in perks and exotic behavior. The problem with this is that players don't want to play with the base weapons; they want the ideal perk combos and exotics with the largest advantage.

I wonder how much is intentional. Everything in balance probably leads to a sedentary player base, no? The slow cycle of "overpowered" kind of generates seasons of renewal as different weapons/exotics/perks rise and fall.

Debate and conflict are fuel, in other words. As soon as you get comfortable with Suros, it is diminished. Each player is softly pushed to grow and change. Maybe that's too sophisticated to do purposely, but the effect is probably pretty healthy.

And also periodically frustrating... :p

This is completely plausible.

Personally, I *hate* that theory of design (that nothing is locked, everything is fluid), and I especially hate it in an investment game where players have spent hours upon hours leveling up item X because it is the powerful one; to take that away from them not because it's overpowered but simply because you decide the move the meta is, I think, cruel. That being said, it's definitely a design philosophy that exists in several games I can think of. Grr.

Everything in balance can lead to a playerbase that gets the 1 thing they want and then stops investing in looking for new stuff. This basically removes your investment "hooks" from the player because they have everything they want. The game is laid bare without the slot machine and progression model tie-ins and the player realizes there isn't actually very much to do and they quit. In theory, anyway. So to keep the investment model working, you give players limited storage so they can't just keep every item in case of future meta shifts. Then you shift the meta periodically, forcing them to get back into the investment slot machine to get the new hotness (even if they already had it once). The hooks stay in.

This is what I deem to be "abusive" game design. It's really slimy and I don't like it at all, but it is totally possible that this is what's going on.

The issue is that some guns are that way by design (Hawkmoon can kill in one shot if you're lucky, two shots if you're slightly less lucky), and I think Bungie based their weapon philosophy on DPS as a whole. If you mess with the perks, you gotta take into account the way some stack, and how some perks (such as Full Auto) tweak the base stats of the weapon (or player). And that's before you even get to base stats on a weapon. It makes sense WHY they take the "easy" approach, but I think it's wrong too...

I think the perks are a big problem, compounded by reforging. Some perks are just so incredibly dominant. Hand cannons are the example right now of having way too much range. As much as I want to play with a Hawkmoon before the nerf, I think hand cannons do have problems. When I can kill a sniper with a Devil you Know or a Thorn, that's a problem. Coincidentally, both have send it on them!

Hand cannons work wonderfully in PvE. At range, they become less effective than scouts. I'm not sure why it's not like that in PvP. It feels like they have much more range in PvP than PvE.

My fix for thorn: lower the rate of fire, nix the send it perk and replace with something else, magazine down to 7 shots. You can still get those two shot kills with the damage, but you can't quite do it as fast or from as much range. I feel that will still be good, but not overpowering anymore.

My fix for Last Word: Fix the bug with the damage so that it only gets bonus damage while hip firing. Increase reload time. Keep two shot kill with hip fire.

My fix for Hawkmoon: I'll report back likely never.

I would be very very careful not to impact Legendary hand cannons. Guns like Devil You Know should probably enjoy the range advantage, given their handicap over the exotics by requiring a 3 shot kill.

I don't think fusion rifles ever dominated. It's always been shotguns. Shotguns in PvP should have their effective kill range cut by a third. You have plenty of options to get in close with sprint and blink and the like. That change alone would probably equalize fusion rifles and shotguns without any other work.

Auto Rifles are a mess, and I have no advice.

Scout Rifles are probably just not really that suited for PvP. Their effective range overlaps with snipers, where they will likely lose. Most of the maps just aren't built for them, and that's ok.

Speaking as someone who has balanced weapons in FPS PvP, I think bungie has been balancing their weapons in exactly the wrong ways.

They seem to come up with base models for each class, balance all of those, and then add in perks and exotic behavior. The problem with this is that players don't want to play with the base weapons; they want the ideal perk combos and exotics with the largest advantage.

When I worked on weapon balance for the early CoD games, we took the ideal scenario for each weapon and balanced those. Then we removed all of the bonuses and looked at the base weapons to see if there were any truly horrible outliers. If there were, we buffed those base models in ways that kept the final, ideally upgraded weapons' stats the same as when we originally balanced them (eg: the DMR with ACOG scope was balanced, but with iron sights it was awful, so we added some zoom to the iron sights to make the base model not totally horrid to use).

We also played with other stats on the weapons. The BAR in CoD:BRO was just the best gun, period. Our weapon designer wanted it to feel authentic, but sadly the authentic reason that not every allied solider had one in WWII was because they were too expensive and took too long to mass produce. So to keep the accuracy and damage values in line with the real weapon, we reduced the player's walking speed, ADS speed, and turning speed when they had that weapon equipped. Likewise, when people used the pistols, we greatly increased movement and turning speeds to make up for the guns being totally inaccurate at range and doing (relatively) little damage. As far as I'm aware, that game was the first FPS that actually messed with player controls in an attempt to balance the weapons.

Were you with Grey Matter, or Treyarch?

Treyarch.

Anyway, I think Destiny's weapon balance should be re-assessed assuming every player has an ideal roll for their chosen weapons. Balance that, remove the perks, and then modify base stats to bring every weapon up to a baseline 80-90% effectiveness compared to the ideal roll. I also think they should make time to kill slower across the board (current TTKs of less than 2 seconds are not fun).

The issue is that some guns are that way by design (Hawkmoon can kill in one shot if you're lucky, two shots if you're slightly less lucky), and I think Bungie based their weapon philosophy on DPS as a whole. If you mess with the perks, you gotta take into account the way some stack, and how some perks (such as Full Auto) tweak the base stats of the weapon (or player). And that's before you even get to base stats on a weapon. It makes sense WHY they take the "easy" approach, but I think it's wrong too...

I'm not really sure that it's "easier" to do it the way that it seems it was done. I just think that they didn't expect balance to be such a big deal, didn't expect players to play so close to the bleeding edge of "best theoretical builds," and didn't plan out how to keep balance as the game progressed. I mean, a lot of the workflow and design of the game just seems backwards to me from how you'd want to do a progressively adaptable game with a constant stream of new content flowing into it. They automated all kinds of things that would make more sense (and take little time) to have curated (bounties, Xur's items, Nightfall modifiers etc.) and simultaneously made a game world that seems to have hard-coded enemy types, spawn numbers, levels, etc. all the while claiming that this is a world that will grow with the players. Heck, even the "random" in-game world events are actually on a very predictable schedule. It doesn't make sense to me unless I frame almost every design element in the cloak of "how can we be evil to get our players addicted?" And that makes me sad.

That all being said, the real problem with Destiny multiplayer is the awful netcode. I don't really get how you can go about balancing weapons when you still have invincible players running around soaking up golden gun shots and people getting postmortem melee kills. Gotta fix that first, imo.

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I'm not talking about "simultaneous" kills. I'm talking about meleeing a dude, watching him take no damage, turn around, blast me with his shotgun, me die, and then him falling over and me getting a postmortem medal.

And I hear what you're saying about lag, but i think that when bungie made the hard choices you describe, they made the wrong choices. It's an unfair advantage to laggers (which is why lag-switching is a thing) because they can lag out, soak 3 full golden gun blasts, kill 2 dudes, and then the game catches up. No other FPS game I've ever played handles lag the way that Destiny does, and no other FPS game I've ever played is as frustrating when it comes to laggy players feeling overpowered and unkillable.

The whole game has TTKs of less than 2 seconds, which means shooting even a single extra bullet at someone while they're lagging has real consequences on your ability to fight the next guy. They seem to have some sort of "server by committee" thing going on where all of the players' systems have to agree on what's happening before it happens, whereas most games just make whoever has the fastest connection be the host. Sure, in Destiny you don't feel that "host advantage" but you certainly feel that lagging is tantamount to cheating.

For whatever reason, it's always magnified during Iron Banner, and is much worse than standard crucible.

My point though, is that there's a really standard model for FPS multiplayer when you don't have dedicated hosts, it works great, and Bungie decided to re-invent the wheel with side effects that I absolutely think are atrocious and were avoidable.