ylaiTarkov studio claims it actually doesn't have the server capacity for everyone who bought the game for $150 to play its upcoming PvE mode, still wants players to pay extra
Cosmic ClericFellow gamers, if you don’t push back against this nonsense now, you will be living with this treatment as customers for a long time, if not forever.
This. People paying hundreds for a skin in CS and hundred for a new game mode that they might not even get into are the reason things we get games like Suicide Squad.
I’ve been seeing this for a while, why do you put a cc notice on your comments?
I’ve been seeing this for a while, why do you put a cc notice on your comments?
This comment by me explains why.
This makes me happy I never got to play Tarkov.
Yeah honestly, I bought Tarkov second-hand for $8 and even then I felt like I was getting ripped off.
It’s probably not news to anyone but the game has extremely lax anti-cheat controls, to almost no anti-cheat controls.
As for why people would cheat in an online game, always seems obvious, but the cheats for Tarkov are so egregious they’re like full blown developer offline DEBUG TOOLS.
I don’t mean “oh no, aim assistance, and they can see you through walls” – the cheat tools are hooking into features of the GAME ENGINE ITSELF, allowing players to see:
PlayerName, Current HP, Current Level, Full inventory contents, currently equipped weapon, position, heading, estimated value of inventory, estimated value of your account, age of account creation, and so on.They can also: Teleport, FLY, increase or decrease their run speed, jump height, and so on.
The cheaters are basically running around with admin privileges in the game, and the developers don’t give a flying fuck. It’s like GTA5 levels of cheating.
Why would anyone play such a game, much less pay $150 for it? You can pay to be abused by people for a lot less than that.
SemperverusWhats sad is that people keep wanting more client-side anticheat to fix this, when the real answer is server-side anticheat and changing the engine to stop being so leaky with that much information.
It’s easy to just handwaive and say “Server side will fix it” but here’s a major issue:
You have to render people in before they appear. How do you do that without the client knowing where people are?
You do something called raycasting to determine visibility beforehand, and don’t render anything not visible.
lol raycasting isn’t optimized for server side deployment, it would increase the poly count of the mesh tenfold, which would in turn increase average ping and fps. Couple that with the client side rendering problem and I don’t know anything about development just kidding
Your suggesting the server maintain a real time render for every single player and somehow manage to get the data back to them in less than 17ms so that they don’t have empty frames that suddenly become people?
Because that’s a ludicrous requirement in terms of latency (ping is totally reasonable at any value under 100ms) and server capacity.
Because your solution sounds like it would cause popping constantly and be a major burden on the server, which is already the largest overhead on a released game.
By rendering people, as in sending data about an object that should be rendered, in a few pixels before they would be visible. And not at all on distances, without a scope (as they would not be visible). Footsteps etc. could be represented by two noise levels precalculated by the servers very roughly, so you can tell someone is there behind you, but a cheat could not determine where exactly.
You want a server to determine if a player should be visible (ie render each player’s perspective) and then get that back to them right before someone walks around the corner? With latency you’d need to render people in at least 200ms before they appear… Which is still plenty of time for a hacker to flick to them and kill them.
True that, but I imagine such sudden flicking to seemingly random positions to be much more obvious than if the hacker had 10 seconds to see the player, tactically preaiming a corner pretending to hold an angle to then be lucky and hit a shot. Would be harder on games with smaller maps, CS like, as holding angles would be much more common than in open worlds - eg. Tarkov.
My point was that you’re multiplying server costs several times to do that complex rendering and still not solving the problem.
If the trajectory and speed says either the client or another player will cross a wall soon where the player sees them THEN it could send the data to the client. You need some tolerance for ping up to maybe 200ms but that’s it. Wallhacks could give you at most a flash of a couple specific people.
You need to account for every gap in the wall, nook and cranny and peephole for these sightlines. You’d have to bake so much detail into every calculation server side that it would effectively be rendering the entire map to host a single game.
It could be a client-side check with verification on the server. Basically transmitting which places are in view. Ray casting like the other person said. Not raytracing which is much more computationally intensive. A server side check basically so that the client can’t just say they’re looking around every corner at once.
But then you’re adding extra latency to all visual calculations.
Your client needs to know if something is visible within the framerate of their PC.
You cannot do that fast enough.
Why not? More computationally intensive things are done to calculate lighting in a lot of modern games as I alluded to. Yes it would increase the load on your CPU but that’s less of a problem nowadays with higher core counts and clock speeds and it’s not like modern anticheats don’t steal some CPU cycles already. I think you underestimate the power of modern computers. I’m not trying to be condescending here but it is worth remembering that gigahertz means BILLIONS of calculations per second.
We’re only talking in theoreticals right now anyways, it is entirely possible that a game studio has tried this and it hasn’t worked, I just don’t put a lot of faith in modern game companies.
You cannot break the speed of light with computational effort.
You’re saying that you want to have a round trip from client to server and back happen in-between frames.
You cannot do that. Period. You will not ever have latencies that low.
Even if you frame lock it at 60fps that means you’re calculating views, sending the data up the tube, checking it on the server, responding back with all the data about the new character that should appear and then rendering the new guy within 17ms.
That is physically impossible.
That’s why I already proposed tolerance for ~200ms with trajectory projections
So you’re going to take all the places a character could be in the next 200ms, do Ray casting on all of them and send that data to the server to check every 17ms?
While the server also does that for 15 other players at the same time.
Do you know what algorithmic complexity is? Big O notation? If so - that’s a n³ * 15m³ problem space that you’re expanding out across 200ms every 17ms, where n is player locations possible in x/y/z and m is the other players locations. Physics collisions are usually the biggest drain on a computer’s cycles in game and in the worst case that’s n² complexity.
You’re talking insanely taxing here.
It’s mainly client side not server side. I’m not typing out an essay for you about a random ass idea I had one day on a forum.
I’m just baffled by the idea. No need to defend it though, this is all arbitrary anyways. It’s not like anyone is going to do this.
True, I’m of the belief that gaming companies aren’t too fussed about cheaters if they’re bringing money in some way.
There are many ways of doing this. I know the source engine uses visboxes, which are calculated once at map compile time. It takes a while to compile, but it means that clients can use the pre-compiled data to calculate parts of the map that are visible and the server can use them to determine what the player can see at a given time. I’m not sure whether it does that or not, but it would make sense to use that data.
I don’t know game development but uh do you? What are you rendering when the player can’t see them? I might legitimately just not get what you mean
You constantly have to render people in when they can’t be seen but will soon be seen. Which also means instead of keeping track of just locations the server needs to render the scene in sufficient detail as to determine sightlines.
Usually games just do this by sending info to clients of where everyone is and letting the clients render people in when the client determines that the sightline isn’t interrupted.
Some games will just not send the positions until they’re within a certain range of each other, but I’m a realistic game like tark you’d need several kilometers of info in case someone scoped in.
If you don’t do this correctly it leads to characters popping into existence from thin air
You could use things like ray tracing to determine if one player can be seen by another on the serverside and only send packages when they can see.
But to resource heavy to do that.
You do see why that’s a serious issue right? Before the Server did nothing more than maintain a list of x,y,z coordinates of player positions. Now it’s rendering the entire game space and doing 3d calculations.
That’s several orders of magnitude more complex and costly.
That’s exactly what i said.
Still no reason to put a root kit on the customers PC.
There’s no way in hell you’ll ever get a game company to agree to that. You’re talking 100x the expense of running a server at a minimum.
CrackhappyHell. I have enough trouble knowing where I am much less predicting where other people will appear.
Cheating is such a hard problem.
Like, this is what leads to invasive client-side anti-cheat. Which also happens to be one of the main blockers for OS portability.
But if you make it so that the server has to constantly validate the game state, you get terrible lag.
You really have to design your game well to deter cheaters. And you have to empower server moderators to ban cheaters. This sorta implies releasing the servers so that communities can run their own instances, because these studios don’t have the resources to handle moderation themselves.
the validation shouldn’t cause too much lag since game needs to sync up the game states anyways. It’s more about not trusting everything the client says the game state should be.
I mean, i’d argue that a car costs a bit more than $150, but i see your point.
Call an Uber
I’d rather pay someone else to slam my dick in a car door for 150 clams.
ℍ𝕖𝕝𝕚0𝕤Cheaters are a big problem in this game. To experience the cool parts of the game without all the bulshit, there is still SPT-AKI for playing solo and also the SIR mod for PvE multiplayer coop.
Why would anyone play such a game
Depends, is it survival or competitive? Sounds normal for a game like Minecraft to me.
Dr. JenkemI was a big fan of the game. Always thought it had potential to be great. I had already quit this wipe pretty much as soon as I hit Max traders. Don’t think I’ll be returning back next wipe.
TrickDacyWho the fuck is paying $150 for a fucking video game? Sounds like suckers who got scammed
*for a new game mode in an existing game
The $150 isn’t for the new game mode. People that paid $150 were told they’d get all DLC. The devs are saying this isn’t DLC and these folks will get it for free once the game is out of early access. People that paid $250 can play this now. People that paid any more will have some level of discount to purchase access to this mode.
It’s all in the article.
Star citizen taught them well.
There’s nothing remotely close to this in SC history.
How much have you pledged?
I think $55 total? $35 for my initial package and I spent $20 a few years ago for a cooler starter ship because I was enjoying the game and wanted to support development. I think the $35 package is now $45 – I bought in on the original Kickstarter – but that price gets you full access to the game and all the ships/locations/etc… you just don’t start with them, and instead have to earn in-game currency. I wouldn’t want a super expensive starter ship anyway, it skips too much of the early game progression.
Actually the game mode is on a pack selling for 250$
People who already bought the 150$ price only get a 6 month free trial of the game mode.
Or they pay an extra 100 to upgrade
$250?! What?! Why??
Why are you concerned? It still costs 250 but if you already spent 150 then you can get it for 50. All is well
(Kill me)
You did well pig, you did well.
Ricky RigatoniIt’s actually 250 euros for the top tier (267 $us)
I mean, seriously, what the actual fucking fuck?
My brother plays games with in app purchases and he claims to know people who have spent $100K on their profiles. I think building a fire using the cash would be less wasteful
I play hearthstone and spend more than that every 3 months to get a complete set of the expansion (well actually now that I think about it, it’s about $150 every three months or so).
I play a lot so my value to time ratio is pretty good but yeah…I don’t really buy any other games.
If only there was a way for dedicated fans to run their own servers for PVE co-op with friends…
Is there?
SPT with MPT mod.