I’ve known that SC/SCR is peer-to-peer for a while (it’s been fairly common knowledge in the community for a long time). I was able to confirm that when I met with the developers and their lead network engineer at 2018’s Blizzcon.
However, over the years, I’ve played far less WC3 so I haven’t been as deep into the community as I am with SC, so I don’t know what’s common knowledge around here. But, because SC and WC3 are from the same Battlenet 1.0 era, I suspected that WC3 also used the same connection schema as SC.
So, before coming to this thread, I asked the TS team if WC3’s game connection was peer-to-peer like SC. They said it is.
SCR had a deluge similar connectivity issues when it launched as well. But over time they tweaked and patched, and it’s now comparable with what it was before Remastered.
What I find funny about this is we were supposed to get a new experience with Warcraft 3 Reforged and them integrating the new Bnet…I guess all we can do is laugh at anyone that actually paid for this experience
Nothing says AAA gaming company like taking months/years to fix something that was fine before they “Remastered” it…give me a break. Just more reasons to never give Blizzard/Activision another dime
I wouldn’t look at it as fixing. They were porting it over to new a Battlenet.
Back the early days, there weren’t nearly as many computing environments as there are today. Now, there’s virtually an infinite number of configurations that they have to try to account for. Not being privy to what that would entail with a game with 20 year old netcode, I can’t assume it would be simple.
its a cost saving measure, right? the only thing blizzard is hosting on the bnet 2.0 is the chat and matchmaking, while shoving over the game hosting to client side. thats a smart way to cut server load and density to single digit numbers.
that also means there will never be a reconnect feature, because its essentially impossible to implement with the host dropping out, at least for matchmade games.
is the creator of custom games always the host? or is literally anyone chosen by random to be the game host in a custom game? looking at observer hosts for league games.
Not sure. It was like that pre-Reforged, so it seems it was just carried over. Early on with SCR when there were a lot of connectivity issues, there were a lot of questions about having a central server system, so the developers knew the community was curious. They did a ton of tweaking to the netcode and even upgraded the hardware to more modern standards to catch it back up, but in the end they decided to keep it peer-to-peer.
I was thinking about that yesterday and wondered the same thing. It appears that SC2 rebuilds the match from some kind of replay-ish file that’s being stored somewhere. If it’s server-side, then maybe it’s not possible in WC3. If it’s local, then maybe it could be.
That I used to know, at least how SC did it. But it’s been so long since I saw the SCR dev team’s post that I forgot. And, the post was on the old forums so I couldn’t find it if I wanted to. But, I want to say that it wasn’t necessarily always the game creator, don’t quote me though.
dont nail me down on that but back in the day there was a minium forced delay on ladder games via bnet to level out the latency between players and/or reduce load on the systems, add the constant ping over multiple matches on top of that and you’re left with the impression games in europe (for example) are being hosted on amsterdam servers and have not been peer to peer connections. however with the forced minimum delay and a strictly locked down server regions its certainly easy to mask. still, im inclined to believe old (pre reforged patches) classic ran on dedicated servers.
that made tools like listchecker and host bots popular, because these allowed to route the game traffic around the bnet to bring delay down due to direct connections.
hostbots and listchecker could be used as dedicated server/hosts, but i used listchecker to host playerhosted custom games aswell. the listchecker hosted games were far superior to bnet hosted games in terms of latency. stability, however, is fully dependant on the hosts internet connection. someone better not send a big email in an important match. for clanwars and league games there were trusted “good hosts” with good ping, stable connection to host those games as observers.
im not a fan of playerhosts because of unfair latency advantages, instability, fluctuation in latency and vastly varying quality of games. pretty much all we have currently.
oh and also grubby has had insanely good pings in bnet ladder games on a regular basis in the recent past, which makes sense, since he sits very close to the data center in amsterdam. constantly low latency wouldnt be feasable with peer2peer connections, unless grubby was chosen to be the host every time.
It was/is common knowledge in the SC community that SC was peer-to-peer. I wasn’t sure about WC3, but since it’s from the same Battlenet 1.0 era and they are both RTS, I suspected that they use the same connection schema. To be sure, I asked Bliz directly:
I understand the example, but my problem is that this is way too main spread for this to be just routing. Replace me being in the middle of these 4 people with a Blizzard server, and you’re saying 50% of customers get 200+ ms to a game that they should have 50 to. There’s no way that’s going to fly outside of an ISP routing issue. And it’d have to be multiple ISPs and half their consumer base. That’s huge!
Which granted I’ve had, when Blizzard swapped things around 6ish months ago my ISP had connection issues for a week or so to Blizzard servers, but for weeks for everyone, I’m just having trouble buying that this is the problem. But I appreciate the examples. I understand what you’re saying.
Also this runs into the problem I mention below, if it truly is routing between people, isn’t it a big coincidence that people can both have the same ping, same area, to what would be a server in the US from EU? Like they aren’t loading a game and getting 100 ms from Sweden to Germany as an example, or 70, or 130, it’s a constant 195-205 EVERY SINGLE TIME for both players. Never changes based on the player or country, other than when they get the expected 20.
It’s over exaggerated to absurdity. If I can play 100 games against Americans, and each time it shows them at 20ms, and 200-250 for me, then I should be able to find 100 Americans that just get 20ms to the Blizzard server in Sydney right? But I won’t, I won’t find any.
Yes you could say, well the “10% difference”, but then you’d have to say that me connecting to someone half way across the world, well in this case them to me, is 200ms faster than routing implemented to servers used by every game company that has a server here.
I’m not trying to sound like I’m attacking you, but the difference is far too large for it to be a routing problem. And it’s 100%. There’s no Australians with magical 20ms to America. I could agree if it was 50ms, but not this much.
Watching people play makes me think there has to be some sort of server that is what the ping is really meaning. It’s too coincidental that every game is the same MS. If it truly was client to client ping, then we should see numbers ALL OVER THE PLACE. 20ms here, 40 to the country 1-2 over, 100 or so, but we don’t. We see 20 20 200 200 200 20. Maybe it spikes up or down 10, but so does me playing on Blizzard servers.
This is basically what I mean. It wouldn’t be showing 19 (Pretty sure that’s what he gets) every single game if it peer-to-peer ping we were seeing. It’d fluctuate based on how far the opponent is from him. But it’s constant every game, unless it’s the random 200 or 400. These gaps are far too big.
My best guess, the ping is to the closest Blizzard server that WC3R uses for w/e. There’s multiple reasons it goes to random ones, load, trying to be fair instead of one player getting an advantage (this I doubt) etc.
Thanks for the explanations, I get how it works now, and I don’t want to sound like I’m attacking you or blaming you, I’m certainly not, it just seems like there’s some kind of Blizzard server involved, that’s what the ping is to, and what’s the point of peer-to-peer if we’re just going to have to deal with a server half the world away anyway?
(Since we three were knee deep in the connection discussion, I quoted you so that you’d both see I replied… because it’s worth it!)
The points you guys were making here had me doubting myself because there does seem to be more going on than what I was describing. So I decided to try my luck and see if I could get some official info on this, and I was able to. And guess what… your suspicions are justified. Despite WC3 and SC being from the same Battlenet 1.0 era…
Currently, WC3R does use a game proxy server to host the online games (both Versus and Custom). And like the other modern Battlenet games, there are several data centers stationed around the world that house them.
For the Custom game lobbies specifically:
When creating a game, the client will ping all the available servers multiple times and select the one with the lowest average latency to the creator as the host. This is so the creator gets the fastest possible connection. (Which doesn’t guarantee a good connection, just the best possible.)
On the flip side, when joining a game, the list of available games is a mix of different servers. Similarly, the client will ping all the available servers multiple times to get an average, and that determines the color bars for each game in the list. Thus, it’s the latencies to the hosting servers, not to the game creators themselves.
Then, once in the actual game (both Versus and Custom), the ping there is the latency between the players and the server, not between the players.
Having said all that, I want to point out that it’s not always the server that botches a match. Sure, they can still be buggy as we’ve seen so far, but if even one of the players has a bad connection to the server, it can stall everyone else who’s connected to it. And if the data takes too long to send/receive, the player(s) is kicked due to ‘not responding’ in time.
Hope this helps!
And on an unrelated note, because it came up in the convo with Bliz and because I’ve seen a couple people ask/confused about it, MMR is being used for matchmaking.
Thanks for the update! I guess I’m both happy and sad about the news. Happy in a sense that minor regions could get a server like we have in other games and potentially play this 20 year old game with 20ms which would be really cool, but sad in the sense I really doubt it’s going to happen.
This would explain why everyone loved Host bots right? Cause you could find someone next to you and have like no ping compared to have to connect to a server so far even though the host was next to you? I’m assuming that’s how it worked. I never used them being Oceanic didn’t matter if host bot or US server, still gonna lag. Correct me if I’m wrong.
I actually thought of something the other day when thinking back on this. If it was peer to peer, would the whole Gateway system have even made sense? If a US West player connected to US West for example, and so did someone from Asia, and it was peer to peer, the lag would be there, and even though you picked the US West Gateway, it made no difference due to it being peer to peer. Maybe you couldn’t really tell with the inbuilt lag, but it’d be there?
The system would seem more like a “hey if everyone from x area plays here, you’ll all have a swell time, but if people from y play, then everyone is sad”.
I’d assume that’s why, cause people who hosted tourneys were sad when they went away, cause instead of finding a middle ground for say Happy from Russia vs Fly100% from China, they’d have to play on a data centre so one player was always laggy.
Least that’s what I understood, don’t quote me on that. More than happy for someone who knows more to correct me.
thanks mate, always a blast with u. great info, thanks for checking.
that also means that we in fact have an issue with players getting assigned on the wrong servers, although both can be from the same region.
we do have more than one server per region now, right? or is it still only amsterdam datacenter for EU west for example?
on a different note, can you inject some feedback directly with high confidence of it being looked at?
also, can you get some insight on this issue of stuttering animations in the game but not in the editor and whether this can be fixed? is it tied to the wc3 game tick rate? can it be set to 60 hz/fps?
Blizzard devs don’t have a solution how to fix ping, desync, and server issues at the moment. It is probably related to the way the merge of the classic and reforged works. Something inherent about the way the merge was coded.
The most I’ve seen is what they publicly show. There’s at least these (change the drop down to Warcraft III):
I have an idea of where the NA data centers are, but not the other regions.
No more than here on the forums.
MVPs don’t have communication lines to everyone. Support MVPs (like me) only talk to customer support and technical support. Community MVPs only talk to community managers. And neither type has access to the developers (of any game), and it’s the devs who are the ones that feedback would go to. I think it’s intentionally like that so that no one outside of Bliz has a privileged ear of the decision makers.
Separately from that, I personally know one person outside the CS and TS groups. By chance, they happen to be someone who knows about the networking infrastructure that they could answer my question.
So anything outside that, like the studdering you mention, I have no one to ask.
But, I want to say that it wasn’t necessarily always the game creator, don’t quote me though.