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by throw0101a 168 days ago
> 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.
1 comments
chongli 168 days ago
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.
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Capricorn2481 168 days ago
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

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chongli 168 days ago
I think you're muddling things up more than they need to be. A peer-to-peer game is one in which players connect directly to each other but neither is the host and there is no dedicated server. Game state is maintained separately on each player's computer and kept in sync by the netcode. Since there is no single source of truth for the game-state, so players are free to cheat by modifying the game's code to lie on their behalf. There is also the side issue of bugs in the game code causing the game-states to become irreparably desynchronized.

All of these issues are solved by having a central server for both players to connect to. Whether that server is owned by the game's publisher or by an open-source community is irrelevant from a technology standpoint. However, the prevalence of IPv4 networks and stateful NAT firewalls is relevant because it privileges those central servers over true peer-to-peer connections.

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Capricorn2481 165 days ago
I don't disagree with you, I just read your comment as deriding people who think hosting their own game servers is meaningful, because it's similar to a company server. Sounds like you didn't mean it that way.
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coryrc 167 days ago
Most people can't run their own server, because they aren't on a public IP!
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