Here is why its ruled out.
There are 2 ways games can run
a) P2P = Peer to peer
One person acts as a “server” and creates the game locally, others then connect to it.
In this case, the person acting as the server can figure out what your IP is
Usually, it is directly given to them in the game itself to issue moderation bans
I understand you can then DDoS an IP of a user to jam the network for them causing them connection issues, or rate limit the IP so they out of everyone else suffer the game experience.
b) Client-Server
In this one, the game company sets up a dedicated game server in various regions.
Everyone will ONLY connect to the server itself.
For instance, I am in the Asia region, In the below screenshot you can see I am connected to the [gen1] server.
https://imgur.com/a/d6XQVys
See the top left corner followed by an IP and then the hashed code for the session
GEN1 = Google Helsinki Server 1 (Or Datacenter 1 or Cluster 1, I wont know from this side)
https://whatismyipaddress.com/ip/34.88.238.114
Here is the IP lookup for the server to Geolocate it, that’s the server of Overwatch I am currently connected to in this example.
In a client-to-server model, it’s not possible for a client (you or me) to know the IP of other clients.
We are not exchanging data with them or talking to them, our connection is directly and only established to the server. (in this example GEN1)
This model allows you to have certain people disconnect, without the entire match falling off.
If it was a p2p, and the person who created the game had internet issues, all of you will have internet issues.
In a client-server, unless the server itself has issues you won’t.
But maybe someone is ddosing the GEN1 server for example?
Good point, is it possible? Yes it’s possible to
But do note, this is hosted on Google, with multiple later of DDOS protection on the infrastructure
It would take a 50gbps or higher dos attack to even start affecting this server (and I’m saying this from tests that we ran on a very small server set, while I am positive Overwatch will have way better servers to handle and scale better).
What about some bug in the game mechanics causing this disconnect on X users?
This is possible, yes, there may be some programming bug in the current season release that by doing something certain in some map or some position can cause lags or disconnections.
Wait, that’s some stupid theory about causing lag this way, how does this magic work? do you have any proof of logic?
Seasons ago, there was such a bug where using Mercy Ult in the Paraiso map would cause everyone except the Mercy’s FPS to drop to 1, essentially freezing the game for others.
Things happen in game development and glitches like these also happen.
Other notable things
- Most home routers (ofc some don’t but these days in a lot of countries this is rather common) will have DOS protection and packet filtering against some laters of attacks
- Some countries have dynamic IP, a simple restart of the router will get you a new IP address
- My IP is not in the screenshot, this Game does NOT leak your IP
- I am noticing when I play (and have tested this with 11 other friends) that when they start the game in Asia region, they notice disconects time to time but they get none if they start the game in Europe region, we are only noticing these issues from this S11 and have observed this for over a week
Hey how did you see the fancy graph that you posted screenshot of?
If you are in a match/deathmatch/practice-range/custom-game and press
Ctrl+Shift+Nthe game will display you these stats, pressing the button again hides it.
This tells you your latency, packet loss, OW server you are connected you, its IP, its name, your latency of your screen to your network.