Comment by chongli
5 days ago
Central servers are useful for more than just NAT hole-punching. They’re also great as a centralized database of records and statistics as well as a host for anti-cheating services and community standards enforcement.
Peer to Peer games with no central authority would be so rife with cheating that you’d only ever want to play with friends, not strangers. That sucks!
> Peer to Peer games with no central authority would be so rife with cheating that you’d only ever want to play with friends, not strangers. That sucks!
Back in the the day RtCW had a server anyone could run and you could give out the address:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_to_Castle_Wolfenstein
There was a server that a ISP / cable company in the southern US ran that I participate in and it was a great community with many regulars.
P2P can be awesome with the right peers.
If you can run your own server then that's still a central server. That still lets a community of people work with a central authority. It's just a different authority from the game's publisher.
In that sense, Mastodon is a centralized service because it's on someone's computer. That's not really what people mean by central. They mean we're increasingly reliant on game companies for networking infrastructure.
Is that all IPV4s fault? I don't think so. But it complicates things
2 replies →
Most people can't run their own server, because they aren't on a public IP!
Cool. You decided you don't care about that, but what if I do?
Don't put words into my mouth! I never said I didn't care about peer to peer networking and peer to peer gaming. I said it sucks if your only option to avoid cheating is to play with friends.
If you only care about gaming with friends, then peer to peer is an excellent way to do that (assuming the game doesn't have any synchronization issues, which some peer to peer games do).