Destiny uses a mix of client/server and p2p (Destiny)

by Xenos , Shores of Time, Thursday, April 28, 2016, 02:42 (3225 days ago) @ Blackt1g3r

I'd be surprised if Destiny is the same.

It seems like it could be pretty similar based on how lag switching works.

The real problem Destiny has seems to have is they want to make the game enjoyable for a larger amount of people, which usually allows people with slow connections (especially sporadically slow connections) to have a little more lee-way on when the information arrives, but not whether the information would be accurate or not. This allows more people to compete in Crucible even if they don't have a <5ms fiber connection, but it also allows for more network manipulation.

In theory, but when they talked about the new "Damage Referee" feature they made it sound like laggy players would be punished. Subjectively, that doesn't feel true to me. It still feels like laggy players can be at an advantage and didn't Beorn just post a video not that long ago that pretty clearly demonstrated that lag switching is still a thing?

Yeah... that's basically what my point was. They both have issues with cheating, but to vastly different degrees, and not because ones on PC and ones on console (though I am sure that does contribute) but because they don't use the same networking models. My point was that Destiny's issue is one related to providing a better experience for laggy players, which allows for more network manipulation by cheaters. The Divisions issue seems to be that (especially at launch) they trust the client almost completely. You could not, for example, in Destiny increase the amount of damage you are doing past a reasonable point in a set amount of time because it trusts other hosts to a certain degree as well (and has limits set in place, so if you lost connection for 1 second you can't do 5 seconds worth of damage) but that's exactly what's supposedly happening in The Division. It's just that Destiny doesn't completely discount what each player experiences either, which is a hard line to balance.

Really the point of my post was that the Division and Destiny networking have VERY little in common. P2P and purely trusted client networking are similar in theory, but because of the intricacies of a complicated multiplayer game end up behaving very differently.

edit: Thought of too good of an analogy to not give. The Division's networking (as posited by this article) works like your standard fishing story: "Last time I caught a fish it was THIS BIG!" whereas Destiny's is one where the people you went fishing with are also there: "Well it wasn't quite THAT big..." The size of the fish may still get exaggerated, but not to the same degree as if you were reporting the story without any other witnesses present.