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It's a shame that you missed the key point of the article in #5. Many games today have suboptimal inputs to their matchmaker, because like you, they refuse to b
by gafferongames 2y ago
It's a shame that you missed the key point of the article in #5. Many games today have suboptimal inputs to their matchmaker, because like you, they refuse to believe that the internet can route a significant percentage of players incorrectly.
Source: Ran a network accelerator with more than 50 million unique players for 5 years. Bad network performance is much more pervasive than you think. https://networknext.com https://networknext.com
- remram 2y agoIf it can route incorrectly, that seems like a strong signal not to rely on your maps. It doesn't matter if you know what the correct latency is, if the users only experience the incorrect one.
- gafferongames 2y agoThe solution is to pair the matchmaker using maps with a network acceleration product that fixes the bad routes, then the latency map and the actual latency experienced are very close. The reason you use the maps in the matchmaker is so you can look up the latency from client to datacenter in constant time and you don't have to waste any time on the client pinging ping servers to get the results. Plus, it costs money to run pings through the network accelerator, and they always (from experience) converge to the latency map anyway.
- remram 2y agoHow much time is wasted? 50 milliseconds at most? And you're about to send 50 packets per second for an hour during the game. Is sending one packet per datacenter really a cost worth mentioning?
- gafferongames 2y ago[flagged]
- remram 2y ago[flagged]
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- gafferongames 2y ago[flagged]
- toast0 2y ago> Especially, why would you do it, when you'll be tracking latency per-player per-match at minimum for your own visibility already, and you could just batch process this data at the end of the day to take the average latency at each (lat, long) and output a greyscale bitmap where [0,255] indicates the latency from that lat/long square to the datacenter. You just need one grayscale image per-datacenter. Given lat,long is a guess and even if it is accurate, doesn't correspond very well to network latency, why wouldn't you use something like the source /24 or /48 rather than lat,lon. You don't get a pretty picture that way, I guess.
- cmdrk 2y agoLove the articles but I think you should disclose Network Next is not merely "a" network accelerator. It's the network accelerator that you're the CEO/founder of, which makes this read a bit like an advertisement.