Matchmaking - they admit it. (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Friday, January 22, 2016, 15:15 (3022 days ago) @ narcogen

Unless Destiny is using a token ring architecture there's no reason to force all high latency players to play together.

I didn't mean making a game with all lag all the time, but rather to keep people who consistently lag out games cordoned off in their own areas (so people in Siberia would only get matched with other Siberians). Eh, it's much harder to do when you have a fireteam and not purely solo players.

That IS what I mean. Unless Destiny is using a ring architecture, someone lagging in the game does not lag you. It only lags them. So sometimes when the server is correcting itself, you'll see the lagged player warp around a bit. However to that player, just about everybody is warping around a bit all the time, as the client tries to predict where players will move and the server corrects them.

Unlike, say, an old game that literally uses a ring architecture, where the world state gets passed around the ring, and everybody has to wait until the slow, lagged player catches up with everybody else, and is frozen until they do.

That kind of design absolutely warrants keeping high and low latency connections segregated. Modern multiplayer clients do not.

Nobody is getting cheated out of what appear to be legitimate kills more often than the person who is lagged-- not everybody else in the game with them. If you're talking about somebody shaping their network traffic-- that is something else entirely and should be detected and dealt with wherever possible.

Ahh, okay. Yes, Destiny uses ring architecture, sort of. They actually invented something new for the game which is quite clever, but doesn't handle lag in a "fair" manner to non-lagging players. There is no "host" but rather each person's system is responsible for telling all of the other connected systems where that player is, where his bullets are going, and if he's been shot or not. This is how lag switchers cheat: They turn off their upbound traffic (literally with a switch) and can still see everyone else's positions as they invisibly move around the map. Everyone else's system anticipates where they'll be from their last known movement vector, which is why you see them just running forwards into a wall. However, they are actually able to fully navigate on their own, shoot a bunch of people, and then turn the lag switch off so that their actions, all queued up, all happen simultaneously. Suddenly three shotgun blasts happen at once, that guy running into the wall teleports half the map away, and your whole team is dead. Without the lag switch abuse, you can still see lag causing actions to periodically bunch up, or players to teleport small distances (usually about 3 yards, from what I've seen). It's enough that your perfect sniper headshot missed, your golden gun didn't kill anyone even though you nailed him, and you've wasted that nova bomb. If they changed the game to no longer rely on each player's system to tell everyone else if they were hit or not, but rather had a quorum of systems agree on when hits happened whenever the shooter and shootee systems disagreed, it would solve the issue with a very modest increase in network bandwidth.