How did you say that to a guy who got the most update rig, with fiber internet and still have 200ms or more?
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No. Just as in WC3 of old, if one person lags, everybody lags. Every player sends their status to every other player. Thatās what āclient to clientā (really peer-to-peer) means. No one player is a āserver.ā
I cant choose Draenor portrait.
even I didnāt leave the game, they did banish me.
we are in 2020, not 2000. we cant reconnect the game.
I guess Blizzardās reconnection system is suck. For example. HofS.
bad ping in custom game either. worse than before. good working Blizzard
Does anyone know what Netease is like for Australians? Will we feel the glorious 20 ping? Iād be happy with 100 ping to be honest. 100 ping will bring the closest to my untapped potential.
do you have a source for the peer2peer/playerhosts connections like routing / traffic protocols? because that seems like one of the remaining things to screw up, and if its true, we got that one checked aswell.
EDIT: Sorry this is so long. It just has a bunch of examples thatās making it that way.
It is possible if the pathways are different, which it will likely be when client to client.
For example, keeping it simple by having all distances the same, a player plays four games:
- The first opponent is 2000 miles to the north. The pathway between them is free of congestion and comprised of well maintained, modern hardware. They get a ping of 50ms
- The second opponent is 2000 miles to the east. Within the the pathway there is a node (one of many hardware connection points) whose hardware is neglected and old causing everything that passes through it to bottleneck. They get a ping of 400ms.
- The third opponent is 2000 miles to the south. The internet part of pathway has is free and clear but their ISP is cheap and shoddy resulting in poor connectivity all around. They get a ping of 200ms.
- The 4th opponent is 2000 miles to the west. A portion of the pathway is fiber optic and is free congestion and is well maintained. They get a ping of 10ms.
So even if they are all in the same general region, the pathways between players can be completely different, all comprised of different hardware and levels of maintenance and bandwidth.
Oh, I was just expanding on the example you gave. Them is the opponents. The first sentence was referring to the two you mentioned having a 20ms latency between them. The second was just expanding the example to make you one of the opponents to show that the pathway would be different, thus the latency could be different.
If Iām understanding you right, that gets into the crazy part of routing. So far, Iāve assumed that both players are using the same pathway back and forth. But two players could have different pathways to each other. So rather than a single ālineā between them, itās more of a ācircleā. This is less likely the closer the players are, but more likely if they are very far apart, like opposite sides of the world.
For (an exaggerated) example, a player is in Australia and player is in America. Each playerās ISP has ārouting tablesā that determine the paths the connections will take.
- The Australianās ISPās routing tables sends them through Africa>South America>North america, and that path has a ping of 50ms.
- The Americanās ISPās routing tables sends them through Europe>Asia>Australia, and that path has a ping of 500ms.
Granted, that is way over exaggerated. But even if 90% of the path is the same, the 10% difference is completely separate hardware.
I definitely donāt mean to imply that nothing is wrong on Blizās end. The gameās netcode could be in need of refining. SCR was the same way when it first released. Lots of connection issues like latency, drops, etc. But they tweaked it over time and now thereās only the occasional report of issues.
To make things even more complicated, even though the match and all its inputs/commands are sent client to client, there is still some server involvement. A couple examples that come to mind are the win/loss data has to be recorded so it must be paying attention to that. And Warden (the anti cheat monitoring software) has to be watching as well. But the extent of how involved it is, I donāt think anyone outside of Bliz knows.
Thereās more to the pathway and connection type than just those. Some that come immediately to mind are:
- They may have fiber to their ISP, but fiber isnāt guaranteed all the way to the other player.
- At its nodes, fiber too can have congestion, can be neglected, have old
hardware, be misconfigured. - Before reaching the fiber, the playerās home network can be bogged down from running too long without a reset.
- The playerās computer can be bogged down with apps, malware, configuration issues, etc. Thereās a myriad of possibilities there.
- Their opponent has crappy connection anywhere from their computer to their ISP.
I have direct lines to Blizās customer support and technical support teams.
(Iām a CS/TS MVP. It doesnāt show in the WC3 forums because Iām not currently flagged here. One of the places I am flagged is over in the SCR forums: My name is a "reserved name" - #7 by Leviathan-1945 - General Discussion - Starcraft Forums)
Iāve known that SC/SCR is peer-to-peer for a while (itās 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 2018ās Blizzcon.
However, over the years, Iāve played far less WC3 so I havenāt been as deep into the community as I am with SC, so I donāt know whatās 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 WC3ās 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 itās now comparable with what it was before Remastered.
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What I find funny about this is we were supposed to get a new experience with Warcraft 3 Reforged and them integrating the new Bnetā¦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 āRemasteredā itā¦give me a break. Just more reasons to never give Blizzard/Activision another dime
I wouldnāt look at it as fixing. They were porting it over to new a Battlenet.
Back the early days, there werenāt nearly as many computing environments as there are today. Now, thereās 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 canāt 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 thatās being stored somewhere. If itās server-side, then maybe itās not possible in WC3. If itās local, then maybe it could be.
That I used to know, at least how SC did it. But itās been so long since I saw the SCR dev teamās post that I forgot. And, the post was on the old forums so I couldnāt find it if I wanted to. 
But, I want to say that it wasnāt necessarily always the game creator, donāt quote me though.
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I doubt they can really fixe it in couple of months for the next DreamHack, at the speed they deliver patch, it can be a live sh.t show again.
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 youāre 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 āgood hostsā 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.
Where did you get that info from?
It was/is common knowledge in the SC community that SC was peer-to-peer. I wasnāt sure about WC3, but since itās 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:
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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 youāre saying 50% of customers get 200+ ms to a game that they should have 50 to. Thereās no way thatās going to fly outside of an ISP routing issue. And itād have to be multiple ISPs and half their consumer base. Thatās huge!
Which granted Iāve 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, Iām just having trouble buying that this is the problem. But I appreciate the examples. I understand what youāre saying.
Also this runs into the problem I mention below, if it truly is routing between people, isnāt 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 arenāt loading a game and getting 100 ms from Sweden to Germany as an example, or 70, or 130, itās 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.
Itās 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 wonāt, I wonāt find any.
Yes you could say, well the ā10% differenceā, but then youād 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.
Iām not trying to sound like Iām attacking you, but the difference is far too large for it to be a routing problem. And itās 100%. Thereās 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. Itās 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 donāt. 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 wouldnāt be showing 19 (Pretty sure thatās what he gets) every single game if it peer-to-peer ping we were seeing. Itād fluctuate based on how far the opponent is from him. But itās constant every game, unless itās 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. Thereās 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 donāt want to sound like Iām attacking you or blaming you, Iām certainly not, it just seems like thereās some kind of Blizzard server involved, thatās what the ping is to, and whatās the point of peer-to-peer if weāre 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 youād both see I repliedā¦ because itās 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 whatā¦ your suspicions are justified. Despite WC3 and SC being from the same Battlenet 1.0 eraā¦
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 doesnāt 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, itās 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 itās not always the server that botches a match. Sure, they can still be buggy as weāve seen so far, but if even one of the players has a bad connection to the server, it can stall everyone else whoās connected to it. And if the data takes too long to send/receive, the player(s) is kicked due to ānot respondingā in time.
Hope this helps!
And on an unrelated note, because it came up in the convo with Bliz and because Iāve seen a couple people ask/confused about it, MMR is being used for matchmaking.
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