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Comment by ssully | Hacker News Reader

You are also comparing two different games in terms of popularity.

CS:GO is usually in the top 3 of most popular games on steam. Last time I checked, it was number 1. I would be surprised if Battlefield V has a quarter of the amount of players (across all platforms) versus CS:GO (which is just on PC).

I am not trying to make excuses for EA (Which has been nothing but a trash fire of a company for the last few years), but how could they justify putting those kind of resources behind a game like BFV?

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CSGO is absolutely a bigger game, and there's money in it but I don't think BF's smaller scale would hinder efficacy at all. It takes a tiny fraction of players to review suspicious actions and collectively remove players from the community. This scales pretty linearly with your player count. From dozens, to millions.

Doing nothing, or doing the wrong thing has atrocious effects on the community. Just read some of the other threads in this post. Seasoned players who wait weeks for flagrant cheaters to be removed. It kills a game quickly.

Maybe that's actually what EA wants.

Saving the replay costs data though. It’s not only the reviewing.

Not much data. You don't need to save actual videos, the server already has all the data so there's no network cost, and you don't need to store the data for very long. Developer cost to implement the feature would far outstrip the cloud costs.

Yes, I cover cost in the head comment.

It does slightly come down to what sort of multiplayer experience you want. Budget in the temporary archiving of ranking multiplayer games. Sell it as a feature. It'll keep the whole thing ticking over a lot longer.

The review cost is nothing. Really. Communities love to self-police so giving them the tools to do it completely, or to a point where they can identify flagrant cheaters for paid mods to verify... It's the Stack Overflow model. It works.

We are talking a couple of hundred kB here. They store more in analytics.

For CSGO it's about 80MB/hour at 32Hz (apparently the current OW rate). Many servers run at 128Hz.

Logging a rolling week's activity at that higher rate requires 53GB but you could dramatically reduce the burden by only keeping things with in-game reports and then deleting recordings after the last issue was dealt with.

My point is it's not nothing, but it's nothing by modern standards if you've got more than two brain cells to rub together.

Then something is wrong with the logging.

If you only record player input: mouse movement, clicks and keystrokes, it should be much lower.

Except that the data logged isn't just "mouse moved x,y to x,y" but more like 'hid frame was X'. And empty hid frames are still hid frames.

you can inspect it yourself, I assume the format is the demo record which has been available in source games since decades

Should it? What sort of density do you expect? 32 ticks a second, say 16 players. At least 512 state/event points to log per second, plus running game state/events.

As I said, it's not nothing, but it's not bad.

It's probably recording what amounts to a demo record, which basically contains everything you would need to reconstruct the player's point of view as if you were spectating them. This means the record must contain everything the server sends to that player (other players' locations, sounds, map state changes, chat, etc.).

Technically you could record only the players' inputs but to play back such a recording, you would then have to deterministically reconstruct the entire match from all players' inputs. That's a bit more complicated than just replaying the local part of the simulation that your client already does with what data the server sends to players during normal course of gameplay.

oliwarner's numbers amount to about 45 bytes per frame per player, which is not unreasonable.

At that rate there's also going to be plenty of redundant information, so I think this data would compress quite well.

> but how could they justify putting those kind of resources behind a game like BFV?

Presumably to fulfill their end of their transactions? It’s not like the game is free; presumably you’re paying for something.

To add; Servers on FPS games used to be run by the players, who could handle cheaters any way they wanted. EA and others have removed this option and should take responsibility for running the only allowed servers.

Pretty much all EA games use Frostbite, so it's not like they would have to redo the work from scratch for each game.

Actually, CS:GO is also on Xbox 360!

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