• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Bungie explains why Destiny 2 doesn't have dedicated servers

VlaudTheImpaler

VlaudTheImpaler

tl;dr
TIL that wanting a frustration free experience means that I just want to be competitive... And since a game that now has 4versus4 MP matches where 4 players compe-.. er uh, play against 4 other players in order to gain a higher score and win It's obviously only being done for the *casuals anyway... And since the announcer constantly tries to goad you into giving up it can't really be called a competition anyway. **I don't know how anyone could get confused and think that they should be taking this seriously and striving to win and want any sort of fairness in doing so.** Bungie knows exactly how fair I deserve their matches to be anyway. Man, when you look at it this way, the lag and frustration from Peer2Peer can actually be looked at as a feature that teaches you patience and to just sit back and chill. Wow, now seeing all the people wanting a less frustrating experience is kinda silly.

*Casual

1. relaxed and unconcerned

2. not regular or permanent, in particular.

3. happening by chance; accidental

4. without formality of style or manner, in particular (of clothing) suitable for everyday wear rather than formal occasions

**“We’ve rethought the crucible with 4v4 for teams. We want to focus on a feeling of (a.)mastery in Destiny 2’s PVP,”

(a.)Mastery

1. comprehensive knowledge or skill in a subject or accomplishment

2. control or superiority over someone or something
 
G-Bus

G-Bus

Banned
I curious as to how much it costs to run servers for something like this.

It must be a lot seeing as a lot of games opt for P2P these days.

In any case I never had a problem with Destiny or I just dont remember it being enough of a problem to bother me. I can see how to more dedicated and competitive people are annoyed.
 
H

HiredN00bs

Member
Yukinari said:
Theres plenty of ways to defend this according to the Bungie employees we currently have in this very thread.
Click to expand...
I would love to work for Bungie. Very cool people there.

SocksAndShoes said:
Companies cutting corners is now a conspiracy theory?

This game is making people lose their minds.
Click to expand...
"They made the game worse on purpose to make more money!" is considered a reasonable opinion on game forums. Be better, NeoGAF.
 
M

mas8705

Member
Right now, people who have played For Honor are probably getting horrible flashbacks when they read this. A game without dedicated servers only leads to trouble down the line.

If anything else, I'll cross my fingers that Destiny 2 pops up in the Redbox.
 
S

SocksAndShoes

Banned
HiredN00bs said:
"They made the game worse on purpose to make more money!" is considered a reasonable opinion on game forums. Be better, NeoGAF.
Click to expand...

*removed unnecessary insult. I'm better than that and I apologize.

Activision is a publicly traded company. They do not, and I'm gonna repeat that one more time; THEY DO NOT care about you, your squadmates, or your online experience. They care about money. They exist to make money.

This isn't just Activision, BTW. It's pretty much any major game publisher.

EDIT: See the post below for a more eloquent explanation than I'm capable of
 
F

Felix Lighter

Member
Activision would be looking at the potential return on investment not necessarily the impact on quality of service. If they feel the worse experience won't impact sales to a degree that warrants the investment in dedicated servers, they won't invest. That's different than determining the impact on the experience. They are banking on people dealing with it and most will. That doesn't mean that the experience wouldn't be significantly improved by dedicated servers.
 
JareBear: Remastered

JareBear: Remastered

Banned
SocksAndShoes said:
This isn't just Activision, BTW. It's pretty much any major game publisher.
Click to expand...

Nailed it.

If the answer to the question in the interview had been "we spent a lot of time working on upgrading P2P connectivity within our engine" I would have bought it. They try do play it off like they couldn't afford servers and that's just lunacy.
 
J

josecitoxnyo

Member
SocksAndShoes said:
Wow. I wish I could be this innocent again.

Activision is a publicly traded company. They do not, and I'm gonna repeat that one more time; THEY DO NOT care about you, your squadmates, or your online experience. They care about money. They exist to make money.

This isn't just Activision, BTW. It's pretty much any major game publisher.
Click to expand...

Why are you even playing games then? lol
 
L

LiK

Member
Felix Lighter said:
Activision would be looking at the potential return on investment not necessarily the impact on quality of service. If they feel the worse experience won't impact sales to a degree that warrants the investment in dedicated servers, they won't invest. That's different than determining the impact on the experience. They are banking on people dealing with it and most will. That doesn't mean that the experience wouldn't be significantly improved by dedicated servers.
Click to expand...

Cannot be more succinct than that. I hate that reasoning but it's the truth.
 
H

HiredN00bs

Member
SocksAndShoes said:
*removed unnecessary insult. I'm better than that and I apologize.

Activision is a publicly traded company. They do not, and I'm gonna repeat that one more time; THEY DO NOT care about you, your squadmates, or your online experience. They care about money. They exist to make money.

This isn't just Activision, BTW. It's pretty much any major game publisher.

EDIT: See the post below for a more eloquent explanation than I'm capable of
Click to expand...
Activision is the publisher, not the developer. They budget the game, but Bungie spends the money they're budgeted. Bungie could ask Activision for more money to implement dedicated servers, if they thought it was worth it. They determine what they spend the money allotted to them on, and it's in their interest to make the best game they can. Hence, why it's a conspiracy theory to say they excluded feature x for profit.
 
B

B.O.O.M

Member
HiredN00bs said:
I would love to work for Bungie. Very cool people there.


"They made the game worse on purpose to make more money!" is considered a reasonable opinion on game forums. Be better, NeoGAF.
Click to expand...

umm yes they did? Listen I understand some are overly negative on the game but people like you need to tone down the mindless defense of these decisions too. Both sides are equally bad. This was a business (read: bottom line related) decision
 
R

ROUGE_BLOCK

Member
From the outlook of the gameplay reveal, still adds to my belief Destiny should go full on MMO and just release a base game with an expansion pack every year.

I mean what's the point of slapping a 2 on the box if we don't really push the series each iteration like they did with Halo?

But more back ontopic that was a terrible explanation why there is no dedis in an always online shooter mmo-lite. The game would definitely benefit tremendously from it is as any online game like this would.
 
S

SocksAndShoes

Banned
HiredN00bs said:
Activision is the publisher, not the developer. They budget the game, but Bungie spends the money they're budgeted. Bungie could ask Activision for more money to implement dedicated servers, if they thought it was worth it. They determine what they spend the money allotted to them on, and it's in their interest to make the best game they can. Hence, why it's a conspiracy theory to say they excluded feature x for profit.
Click to expand...

No, you're once again missing the main motivation here. It's not to make the best possible game. It's to make money.

Let's take your train of though all the way to the end of the tracks here: If they really only had the consumers interests at heart, and really didn't care about profit margins/stock holders/etc, why even charge for the game at all?
 
J

josecitoxnyo

Member
HiredN00bs said:
Activision is the publisher, not the developer. They budget the game, but Bungie spends the money they're budgeted. Bungie could ask Activision for more money to implement dedicated servers, if they thought it was worth it. They determine what they spend the money allotted to them on, and it's in their interest to make the best game they can. Hence, why it's a conspiracy theory to say they excluded feature x for profit.
Click to expand...

Also, to add to this reasoning, they reworked their tools to optimize the amount of content they can put out, something that had a bigger priority to them and most of the playerbase.

So if it wasn't that important before, it's even less now.
 
Pegasus Actual

Pegasus Actual

Member
josecitoxnyo said:
There's also a 133 page document explaining how the networking works too that has all the answers you need, what are you going to read?
Click to expand...

You realize that pile of slides also basically says dedis are better but no dedis because expensive? And it's very highly focused on the PVE stuff.

Actually they do make one (pretty bad) argument in favor of P2P hosting in saying that local matchmaking will keep latency lower and make the game more responsive. Keep in mind, when the hell are you truly playing local? If you're queuing with only local friends and get queued with only local enemies sure but how often does that really happen? I guess it'll happen more in high population areas. Like the kind of areas you would place your dedicated servers in. And thus not improve on latency to begin with.

And then of course you have all the other issues with player hosting that make it definitively worse. Like when the game goes to shit because the host's roommate gets home and starts streaming 4k Netflix or something.

Their Crucible networking is just bad. I get how "Activity Hosts" works for PVE and their always online model but for competitive multiplayer you only have to play almost any other game to see that Destiny doesn't perform as well, or even acceptably in comparison.
 
VlaudTheImpaler

VlaudTheImpaler

tl;dr
josecitoxnyo said:
This is why people instead of simply bitching about stuff, need to take a minute and understand things, it's better for all of us in the long run.
Click to expand...

First off, people complain about things they don't like and would like to see change. This is especially important in the consumer market where people in suits who have the ability to enact those changes could be watching.

Secondly... How? How is it better in the long run? What does this mean? How long do I have to deal with the frustration? Till Bungie dictates? Do you not believe that features have ever been implemented in any game due to consumer outcry/demand or feedback?

If Bungie doesn't want to do it for whatever reason they are going to need a better explanation than what they have given if they expect people to understand.

No one in their right mind who knows how big this game is and how well it's sold is going to believe it is because they don't have the money to do so. They most certainly do.

I'm all for devs defending their vision and doing whatever they want to do. But it's totally on them how that turns out. What you are seeing here is a reaction to a terrible explanation. People aren't buying it and they shouldn't be expected to.

You have to understand that this is a game that they are expecting people to invest their time into for years and years to come. A whole lot of people including myself had very frustrating experiences last time when it came to PVP where we don't have the same experiences in games that have dedicated servers or that have since switched to them (Halo anyone?). Some people don't want to invest that much time into the game again in the fear of having to deal with the same frustrating things again and that will take forever to be fixed.

The problem is, that for a lot of long time MP gamers it's been a long fight to get our favorite MP games onto dedicated servers. Now, most of the big ones are there, as already mentioned. A lot of people just don't want to have to take that step back and deal with the jank knowing the history of past games and how long it has taken to implement Dedicated Servers when the game is so popular and it's easier to ignore the voices of the players over the sound of the money flying in.
 
A

Archaix

Drunky McMurder
Luke Smith seems especially terrible at justifying bad decisions. I'm sure it's not easy, but he makes it sound worse every time I read or hear from him.
 
S

Saucycarpdog

Member
josecitoxnyo said:
Of course it will, the thing is, having a dedicated server does not mean it's a instant improvement if the code running in it is shit.
Click to expand...
So first you say dedicated servers don't mean shit cause you live in South America, then you say only MLG competitive players want them and casuals don't care, and now you're saying it's the code that's the problem.

You're flip flopping is getting ridiculous.
 
G

Grief.exe

Member
This type of revelation is surprising to me as Destiny is planned to have years and years of content and games. As a result, any investment into server infrastructure now continues on down the road. Servers they spin up for Destiny 2, can be transitioned to Destiny 3 as needed.

The calculus likely is most people won't notice the issue or won't recognize the underlying technicalities, so it's a 'better' investment to increase their margins.
 
J

josecitoxnyo

Member
Pegasus Actual said:
You realize that pile of slides also basically says dedis are better but no dedis because expensive? And it's very highly focused on the PVE stuff.

Actually they do make one (pretty bad) argument in favor of P2P hosting in saying that local matchmaking will keep latency lower and make the game more responsive. Keep in mind, when the hell are you truly playing local? If you're queuing with only local friends and get queued with only local enemies sure but how often does that really happen? I guess it'll happen more in high population areas. Like the kind of areas you would place your dedicated servers in. And thus not improve on latency to begin with.

And then of course you have all the other issues with player hosting that make it definitively worse. Like when the game goes to shit because the host's roommate gets home and starts streaming 4k Netflix or something.

Their Crucible networking is just bad. I get how "Activity Hosts" works for PVE and their always online model but for competitive multiplayer you only have to play almost any other game to see that Destiny doesn't perform as well, or even acceptably in comparison.
Click to expand...

That pile of slides explains everything, literally everything, you're just taking that so much to heart that you can't understand how can they choose a worse solution. That's dictated by a budget, a workforce, changes to software that take time, money and resources. If you only want to say "yo they cheap out" it's ok, the answer is more complex than that.

You can bet that even having more budget, they will still use the same solution, why? cause if that budget is more useful to improve other parts of the game they'll do it.

Saucycarpdog said:
So first you say dedicated servers don't mean shit cause you live in South America, then you say only MLG competitive players want them and casuals don't care, and now you're saying it's the code that's the problem.

You're flip flopping is getting ridiculous.
Click to expand...

No, you're carefully taking parts of my posts without understanding sarcasm and the whole argument, but hey it's all good.
 
M

MilkBeard

Member
This is the bigger problem for sure, and is a disappointment, considering how many people will be buying this. They could always find ways to help manage the cost if it really comes down to it. We live in a world where developers can sell skins and make bank. No excuse for this.
 
S

Souldestroyer Reborn

Banned
So basically they're pleading poverty.

Even though they were making profit on Destiny since like day 2.

Bit of a bummer and it can be a pita, but it's great when it works out in your favour :D
 
T

Tecnniqe

Banned
The Last Wizard said:
That silver bullshit and micro transactions will be in day one though😂
Click to expand...

0Ku3v8o.gif
 
S

Saucycarpdog

Member
josecitoxnyo said:
No, you're carefully taking parts of my posts without understanding sarcasm and the whole argument, but hey it's all good.
Click to expand...
Sarcasm? Sounds more like you're backpedaling to me.

But hey, I'll give you a chance. What exactly is your "whole argument"? How do all of your various arguments tie into one another?
 
H

Head.spawn

Junior Member
HiredN00bs said:
Activision is the publisher, not the developer. They budget the game, but Bungie spends the money they're budgeted. Bungie could ask Activision for more money to implement dedicated servers, if they thought it was worth it. They determine what they spend the money allotted to them on, and it's in their interest to make the best game they can. Hence, why it's a conspiracy theory to say they excluded feature x for profit.
Click to expand...

Either for profit or for savings, it's all semantics and has the same end result. If you want to do things cheaper and less consistently for the end user, P2P is the way to do it.
 
H

HiredN00bs

Member
SocksAndShoes said:
No, you're once again missing the main motivation here. It's not to make the best possible game. It's to make money.

Let's take your train of though all the way to the end of the tracks here: If they really only had the consumers interests at heart, and really didn't care about profit margins/stock holders/etc, why even charge for the game at all?
Click to expand...
Why aren't they making mobile games, then?
 
F

Fewr

Member
see5harp said:
I almost feel sorry for him. You couldn't fit this into the budget? What about all that grandiose shit you talked about prior to Destiny coming out? Couldn't fit that in either?
Click to expand...

What I find striking is the difference between games journalist Luke Smith how he'd go mental over this, and this other apologetic version of him.

He's only communicating the bad news from a questionable business decision. I too feel sorry for him having to be the person to receive the negative comments.
 
J

Jblanks

Member
ZeoVGM said:
It's the same type of response Luke Smith usually gives. He has a clear passion for the game and looks to be part of the reason Destiny turned into such a great game.

But he doesn't know how to word anything and when he tries to explain controversial things, it comes out as clueless and disrespectful to the community.[/QUOTE]

Him and Deej make a great team.
Click to expand...
 
F

Forsaken82

Member
see5harp said:
I almost feel sorry for him. You couldn't fit this into the budget? What about all that grandiose shit you talked about prior to Destiny coming out? Couldn't fit that in either?
Click to expand...

That's not what he said at all.

He said that they decided just not to make the investment on it. They feel that the cons don't outweight the pros enough to warrant the time and money required to set up a dedicated server structure. It has nothing to do with being able to fit it in budget or not.

You want to make a statement? Don't fucking buy the game. Make them realize that people actually give a damn about it. Don't be like the other 90% who claim to give a shit, but buy the fucking game anyways, reinforcing the decision not to give a shit.
 
P

ponpo

( ≖‿≖)
Is ign really responding to people in interviews with stupid twitch memes? "Rip the dream", really?
 
H

HiredN00bs

Member
FUNKNOWN iXi said:
The news surrounding this game keeps getting worse..
Click to expand...
Only in cynical hyperbolic gamer outrage land. As a fan, the presentation was solid and hit key improvements. No one experienced with Bungie's games since Halo was expecting dedicated servers or 60fps. Hoping, not expecting. People have unreasonable expectations about design. Not all projects are equal, not all developers are equal, and making good games is a fucking hard thing.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

Xbox's automated 'moderation' systems need to be scrapped. Microsoft has fired thousands of customer service employees, and replaced them with AI
Opinion News Drama 2
93
6K
StereoVsn replied
Hidetaka Miyazaki talks Armored Core 6 with IGN
News 2
69
6K
Kokoloko85 replied
Wild Hearts Will Have Offline Play, No Microtransactions, Performance & Quality Mode Revealed & More
News
5
1K
Superkewl replied
Blizzard explain why they are having so many outages with Diablo 2 Resurrected (legacy service causing issues, some tech issues too)
News
12
2K
Kacho replied
Overwatch 2 | Review Thread
News Review Platform 2 3
109
8K
jorgejjvr replied
Top Bottom