I’m sorry I’m not a tech guy so I’m still struggling a bit too understand, so the reason they don’t just have lobbies for maps and than apply difficulty and modifiers when you load into the map is less resource strain? Or would that even be feasible to do in the first place?
There doesn’t, and I’d be very surprised if that model was being used here. I’d be interested to see where this “1 difficulty/lobby per server” idea came from, because I can’t imagine how it’s a good model in terms of managing server resources.
I suspect server resource allocation is dynamic. The server group probably doesn’t care (within limits) how many lobbies are running on it or what difficulties/modifiers they are. The hosting service automatically increases and decreases access to resources when needed.
And those also happened very frequently in early v2 days. People just seem to have forgotten. Mission selection also has nothing to do with current server implementations, its just fatshark being fatshark.
But @anon38135248 highlighted the main issues. The experience could varie wildly if you did not host games yourself and there really was nothing worse than host crashing/rage quitting/whatever on a final event and making 30 minute run irrelevant.
At least in darktide you can attempt to re-join a game. I can only imagine how fun this would have been in the launch days of darktide if even rejoining was quaranteed not to work.
But realistically most of the issues with dedicated servers atm are with fatsharks spaghetti implementation and not with the tech itself.
This is probably the only valid reason to have P2P, however even this does not quarantee that something like vermintde2 will stay alive forever. Its certainly cheaper to maintain but you still need the main server for stuff like loot.
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We wanted both. We wanted the ability to leverage dedicated servers, as well as the ability to host servers with our PCs. The current state of the servers is not at all we what we wanted, which is mindblowing since we’ve been giving Fatshark feedback for years upon years at this point since VT2, much less VT1
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erm i dont think thats how it works, but im not a rech guy either , i was talking about something else 
people were sking why we cant have every mission with every modifier available to choose from ie why we only get a limited selection , i was just pointing out to fill that number of lobbies often enough to keep que times down would require massive amounts of players on , and its way past what we have.
At the cost of the game dying quicker in the future, as there is no self-hosting/rental options.
You could disband that and just have local saved files. There’s already a modded realm so people could “cheat” anyways I guess. But yeah it’s a lot easier to transition to a “serverless” support model when you’re going from P2P
You could and you could also matchmake with something like hamachi, but realistically how many are willing to do this nowadays?
Like its fine in concept and for game preservation but if central server gets shutdown you realistically aren’t playing the game any longer as it was supposed to be played.
You get things like player hosted servers. Satisfactory, Valheim, Killing floor 2. They do it.
in most cases those servers are run on the same PC that gets played on and as such they have the exact same pro and cons as P2P.
the games you mention are big on the sandbox side
the problem occurs once we look into how DT game progression works, it all runs over their server,
so if you want progression in player managed servers you’d be forced to remove that lock, wich opens Pandora’s box, players could manipulate their inventories, unlock everything, even for people who just so happens to join that server for a minute, depriving players of the experience, and basically force you to live with that or delete your character.
Killing floor 2, is an good example, since it has both decentralized and centralized servers,
if you ever browsed, into the more extreme servers, you’d find dozens of “Killbox quick 800% XP” servers.
that works because player hosted server send the XP information to the player profile and then the main server simply copies whats in there. (the servers also are responsible for awarding skin boxes and communicating with steam inventory so you can’t cheat infinite skins)
but since DT has gear progression, you’d have 2 options:
- No gear progression as long as your not playing on official servers! (basicly how it is now with some just for fun servers)
- conceding that players can freely give themselves any item they desire.
it would absolutely kill any sense of pride in obtaining gear, and trivialize what other had to grind for.
in games like factorio satisfactory you usually play with a group of friends so it doesn’t matter how you want to modify your experience.
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All this talk of player-managed servers is academic anyway, since it isn’t going to happen. This game is too deeply entrenched in GaaS design. Their business model relies on them being in control of the whole environment.
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For sure. But obviously being able to play the game if you wanted, and allowing players to host and connect easily is the priority. Everyone would essentially be max rank so it would be more focused on challenging content. Or you have some popular servers where your progress is tied to that server (like in those sand box games) but the progression is much faster. Obviously it’s better to have a functional system with no progression vs not. Single player games can still make it hard with encrypted files and hashes to make even a single player game hard to “cheat” but much easier still to a hosted server.
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I think p2p is still better than this kind of dedicated servers, but, in general, dedicated servers are much better.
The issue is not p2p vs dedicated, but corporate greed vs gamers’ freedom.
I remember Battlefield:BC2 which had dedicated servers (on PC) which you could rent, but only from selected cloud providers.
The result?
These cloud providers, in the interest of “gimme more money” overprovisioned the sht out of these virtual machines and the server performance on these private servers was abysmal. You couldn’t do anything about it, such as rent a better server, because you couldn’t get the server-side software.
We have the technology. It’s just that when it passes through the greedy hands of these companies, you are left with a pile of dog poop.
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For P2P. One thing that happens often in V2 is when the host dies he rage-quits or another scenario is when the host gets disconnected in some way and thus everyone loses their progression all because the host left.
I do agree that the dedicated servers can be laggy and frustrating at times so I hope that Fat Shark will work on it and optimize the problem eventually, but I rather much have dedicated servers as it is now.
You can have proper host migration in P2P so as to not avoid progression lost when a host leaves. Why they didn’t do this in VT2? Beats me.
My biggest issue with dedicated servers isn’t the laggyness and such that they are now, it’s more the business model you have to adopt to make it cost efficient. Servers cost money, every month. Fatshark wants this game to last like 10+ years (or so they said). MTX is the only real way they could do it. And I am fine paying for regular DLC content (like in Vermintide 2), cosmetics I never pay for. But what upsets me is the MMO style grind progression loops they have, and the frustrating map rotations they have which are being hamstrung by dedicated servers.
I think if we’re comparing P2P and dedicated hosts we can generally do so assuming both are working correctly and properly in terms of technical bugs and issues (but not their actual limitations).
I for one am absolutely happy about the usage of Dedicated Servers.
Fatshark promised this for VT2, they really did. People were very disappointed when they weren’t in.
And this time around they got around to it. Sure it’s not dedicated self-hosted servers, but I guess it would be difficult to have officially tracked progress.
I certainly remember the mess that was Team Fortress 2 and Day of Defeat: Source achievement farming servers. And then there is the intended player experience. A good chunk of the playerbase on Valve’s Orange Box games never got to experience the original intended gameplay because of all the mods servers were running.
Don’t get me wrong, some great things also came from this, such as surfing servers from Counter-Strike or massive 64 people Zombie matches on community created maps. Incredibly fun.
That said, what we got here is still miles and leagues above P2P. I don’t know if you people remember, but I certainly do:
→ Ragequitters throwing +40 mins of gametime under the bus because they died
→ Losing all progress upon a disconnect
→ The unbearably terrible ping and wonky hit detection P2P games always suffer from
→ “Is my internet being unstable or was this the fault of the host?”
→ Massive Votekick abuse and entitlement
→ Not enough lobbies because few people wanted to host
→ Too many empty lobbies because everyone at that time wanted to host
Think back to the first launch weeks of Darktide where all the technical issues were much more intense. With dedicated servers, many got annoyed by the crashes but were fortunate enough to return to the same match and finish it.
Imagine if that had not been in. The game would have been unplayable with VT2’s system for many and the fall out for the launch would have been this much severe.
Then there is the fact that sometimes there weren’t enough lobbies because people refused to host or too many empty lobbies because more people wanted to host than connect.
So, to make a TL;DR and answer OPs question:
Why did people want dedicated servers in VT2/the next Tide game?
Because they are straight up superior in every way, even with the tick rates and the occasional issues we currently have here and there. If you find the current gameplay experience unstable or not good enough, you’d have lost your patience with VT2 and especially VT1. Trust me on that.
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You’re not wrong, at all.
One thing I’ll say, is that if you mostly play with your friends, and you all have decent/good connections, then P2P is going to be better. No server lag, no connection issues.
Especially because then VT2 we’ll be able to play pretty much forever. Darktide, when FS shuts down the servers, that’s it it’s done.
But I realize that’s a much smaller use case - most people lobby with pubs and your points are correct. But I just thought that was worth throwing out there.
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i would say easily, allow both.
for me i prefer FS servers, host migration if host crash in VT2 was horrible , sometimes if a laggy player joins your lobby while midgame, it drops your FPS to 10-20s until they fully connect.
once at chaos wastes with Randoms, at last room hosts crashed, each was set on his own lobby alone and reseted back to first mission.
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This has been explained but I can’t remember what was said. It was something about save states or whatnot. Basically, host migration being possible but atvthe same time not being desirable enough based on what it could achieve.
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only if your not dedicated enough to look, many games with shutdown servers, were reignited by their fans, and are in perfectly playable condition.
there are some interesting stories of communities like the one from (now titled) skylords rebornd where the modders managed to get legal rights to continue releasing new content under the premise they changed the name and wouldn’t use it for commercial gains.
but even games who weren’t fortunate enough are still being played via game ranger, hamachii or similar services,
i get that those communities can rarely even begin to hope to recreate the popularity of the original release, but its rare for a beloved game’s to totally fade.
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