Does anyone know why players drop instant from games or beeing disconnected, whats causing this issue?
I see players drop often and i get disconnected more and more without loss of connection to web.
Starcraft uses a connection technology called P2P, there is no central server like many games out there, or like Starcraft 2 for example.
What is the difference between P2P and a central server implementation?, that the connection once the game starts depends only on the people that are playing, if its a 1v1 game and the other player disconnects, lets say a cat pulls the plug, you will see your client trying to search it and search it…it will never find it and the game drops.
Now in a game with a lot of players there is where it becomes a little bit complicated, because all players connect the same way but “topologies” or “small cluster of connections are made”, let me explain, if you have a game with 8 players and 2 of them are very near and stable those 2 players will work as “nodes” to connect the other ones that are further away and less stable, so what happens when one of this “nodes” disconnects?, well you drop everyone behind that as they depend on that other player that “tunnels” all the info from the other players…
Now dont get me wrong, the game is quite smart, if someone like that drops the game tries to connect the other players directly and makes a new “topology”, but this will obviously be slower.
There is what is called a STUN server, which is the backbone of the P2P operation, this server makes routers of different kind be on “sync” and also helps creating quick information about this routing and gives the clients or computers information about how to build this topologies.
So long story short why people drop or disconnect?, because the network implementation is based on P2P and that depends on the players and not Blizzard, this is because they want to save money and also because the Starcraft netcode, the code that makes Starcraft work online is old and it would be a complicated endeavor to update it to a central base.
P2P is weird, you can have a high Turn Rate connection with someone from the other side of the world and then lag with someone in your same city, the reasons is because infrastructure for third world countries is not self made, it depends on backbone connections in other countries, so communications might make a HUGE leap to send data, Starcraft player base in the western world is almost 70% Peruvian, and this sometimes the situation with that infrastructure.