previously, maps was downloaded while waiting for the game to start. now it is downloaded before joining. to make matters worse, the new system is bugged. maps will some times fail to download. i think blizzard should revert it to the old system and instead make all players download it at the same time.
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But why? Isn’t the old system kind of disrespectful to those who already have the map? Shouldn’t they have the priority in joining? Downloading maps through BNet is dumb as is.
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priority does not matter for maps like mine which is being updated after every round. with the old system, players could join right away wether they had the map or not. with the new system, they can some times only join when they have the map. downloads often fail, preventing players from joining at all.
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The old peer to peer based system had major issues. Specifically it used a sliding window based algorithm which worked fine in the times of slow internet speeds but was unsuitable for faster internet speeds. Specifically it would struggle to pass 30kb/sec in most practical applications only reaching high speeds in LAN (proper LAN, not faked WAN) where latency was very small.
Host robots mitigated this issue to some extent by violating the file exchange protocol used and effectively using an infinite window size.
With the old system people who had the map could join and would enter the lobby instantly. Anyone who did not have the map would enter the lobby instantly but be placed in a queue to download the map. Map downloads were peer to peer and used a flawed algorithm so were very slow even if both sender and receiver connections could manage much faster.
That is a bug. I suggest helping find the cause so that Blizzard can work on fixing it. No need to revert to a worse system instead of fixing a slightly buggy better one.
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they could revert to the old system and update it so that it works better than it did.
they could drop the queue completely and instead make all players download at the same time.
The current map download system is a mess. Popular maps have been cheated/altered and uploaded 100 times and meanwhile noone knows anymore which one is the real version. For example I have 5 different 6.83d DotA(which was the last official release by Icefrog) maps in my Download directory : 6.83d, 6.83d~1, 6.83d~2 etc. (ingame they all appear as 6.83d, i.e. you don’t know on which map you are playing)
The hostbots provided some authenticity since they downloaded the maps from the official websites and some of them even were in touch with the real developers.
Since their demise every day players get fooled by cheaters who can type -mh to reveal the whole map (or other commands like -gold, -xp, kill). Others won’t even notice what the cheater typed since he can just write the command in the Observers chat.
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That’s what I meant by saying it had been unfair to those who had the maps. Because the have-nots could join and then download.
Why don’t you know? If you have the real map, and then you see a lobby called “dotka 6.83d” whose map is not owned by you, that map is fake. Is that too hard?
???
You can download the maps from the official websites, too. I suggest epicwar.
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With peer to peer bandwidth is a big problem. No point having many people download in parallel when the person’s upload cannot even supply 1 of them at full speed.
In any case the new system will work perfectly once all bugs that cause downloads to fail are fixed.
No they did not. Anyone with too much money could set up a host bot to host all the hacked maps they wanted.
They can detect such maps by deleting all but the genuine from their Downloads folder. If they have to download before joining they know it is a fake and can either work with the host to fix the issue or they can host their own of the genuine version.
The problem is that they do not change the file name and instead modify some content of it. Redownloads are triggered when a hash mismatch occurs (the file is not the same, even 1 byte changed). This is where the “map~1” style suffixed come from as there is a name collision but a hash mismatch and to prevent data loss it has to assign a unique generic name.
As mentioned above, the solution is to purge your Downloads folder from such fakes so that you known when you are downloading fakes as well as to keep them out of your host list so you do not accidently host a fake version. Been like this since the very old days, nothing new.
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The hostbots had established communities with lots of people (thousands of players). If some corrupt admin would have uploaded a cheated map, someone would have noticed that and informed the staff / owners. Ofc anyone could have created a hostbot with cheated maps but he would have lacked of players / a decent community and they wouldn’t have been able to establish one. Most players played only on the big communities anyway (bk, ent, ohs).
Personally I know my maps and which one are cheated and which are not. But so many people don’t and they keep dling and playing on cheated maps. Even when the developers write on the loading screen not to download the map from Battlenet, ppl still will fall into the trap.
So I stick to my argument that the hostbots provided authenticity for the maps which is now gone.
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Exactly what I said, just more eloquently.
So, dumb people. An IQ check.
Aren’t autonomous communities a problem? They can ban innocent people and stifle the growth of other maps.
one improvement they could do to the old system is to make it like bit torrent, so that players download from each others and the cloud. that will solve some bandwidth problems. noone have my maps except me because i keep working on them. they could possibly allow the host to choose system when hosting, that could please everybody.
Tufu whats best way to contact you? want to check if our league map is currently safe and non edited and maybe partner further. can you msg me on ENT or discord?
honestly ide rather have the new method because before if you didnt have the map or had slow download speed people would just kick you. now you can download the map without fear or disturbing anyone.
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they could just prevent people from kicking people that are downloading(that is not exactly nice). that would solve that problem. i never kicked people that was downloading unless their downloads was stuck. as it is, many people will cancel downloads because it takes too long. that in return makes it very difficult to test large maps like faction war.
@Rohkalan, I have uploaded the latest dota map (ne10) here:
x_https://www.epicwar.com/maps/294991/
If you want to verify that your map is the real one you can also compute the sha256 checksum on a commandline. It has to deliver the exact same number as written below:
0a384d20f4c19669d609a46fb8f0503dabec4fb873361326cb38660667980297
You can contact me on ENT forums. My accountname there is Tufuuu.
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You mean exactly like now? Where one can have a community in discord for a map and keep track of reliable hosts? You kind of gave another reason why no one misses robots…
Except the same people who keep downloading the “cheated” maps are the ones who were never part of any community. Hence they would still download “cheated” maps from robots if someone spent a few dollars on spare CD Keys to set one up.
The Blizzard servers should have near gigabit upload speeds. No need for any sort of peer to peer as StarCraft II shows.
Most modifications are in the form of a modified trigger script file. Use MPQEdit to extract the trigger script file and then look for typical cheat command words. The chat scripts themselves are often not obfuscated so are easy to spot.
When someone on a 30 KB/sec internet connection is downloading a 128 MB map it will take over an hour to finish. You will be kicking them…
New system mirrors StarCraft II. People can download the map in advance before joining so hosts do not have downloads to worry about. So hosts do not start while people are joining maybe the number of queued people could be displayed to the host. Equally well if the host starts before the map finished downloading maybe give the player the option to allow the download to continue but browse for other lobbies to play.
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In all these years when hostbots hosted DotA, LTD, HvsA I never saw someone creating a hostbot just for the purpose of hosting cheating maps. And it doesn’t make sense since it isn’t worth the money and the efforts to build up a hostbot system if you can’t get barely 10 players to play your cheated maps xD
Just compare the today state with the hostbot time. Nowadays I see every day cheated popular maps being hosted & played,players are getting fooled on a daily basis. Back in the hostbot era I never saw cheated maps being hosted. It may have happened, but those guys who tried it apparently failed, since ,I repeat myself, I never saw someone hosting a cheated map, especially not a hostbot. This is just nonsense.
I won’t elaborate about the other stuff you said since this is not the topc of this thread. Fact is that Bnet is kinda empty now, my impression was that ENT alone gathered half of all bnet players ![:smiley:](https://dou48tnq0ocoa.cloudfront.net/en/warcraft3/images/emoji/twitter/smiley.png?v=6" ":smiley:")
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no, i will not be kicking players for downloading(that is not my style). hosting 128 megabytes maps is not possible anyway as long as the limit is 8 megabytes.
That is logically correct. However the current multiplayer map size limit is 256 Megabytes, and has been for nearly a year now. Hence now one can host 128 MB maps on BattleNet.
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then why was there nothing about that in the patch notes?