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Comment by skizm | Hacker News Reader

I remember when I was younger I would play games where the game would designate a "host" player. If that player quit the game would pause and it would show a message like "searching for new host" and in a few seconds the game would resume from there. I am guessing this player acted as the central server for that particular game. I don't see this very often any more. In fact, I can't think of a single game that does this off the top of my head.

Anyone know why this isn't a viable solution now-a-days? I know MMOs wouldn't be able to do this, but something like League of Legends where there are only a set number of players (smaller is better). This frees the developers from a lot the responsibility of maintaining servers. They would probably still need some to actually hook up the players in the beginning, but that's about it. That could be as "simple" as a web app (like Battlefield's "Battlelog").

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IIRC almost every online game for the Xbox 360 uses the P2P strategy (which is funny, given that Microsoft charges for online), so I wouldn't say that it isn't common or viable. You don't see it as much in PC games because PC gamers are more capable of running their own dedicated servers, which provides a superior experience while still shifting the burden from the developers to the players. P2P is still the norm for genres with small numbers of players per game (1-on-1 fighting games, co-op games with small parties).

EDIT: I'd assume the reason that games like LoL don't use P2P hosting is that the games are competitive and ranked, and having players host in any fashion would make it all too easy to cheat your way up the leaderboards.

Some games do still allow players to host. Team Fortress 2, for example, and it's quite common with friendly games of Minecraft. I honestly can't recall any games that can switch the host player on the fly, though. Even then, the new host's hardware and connectivity may not be up to the task.

In any case, player hosting was always problematic. Running a server for a couple of dozen players is intensive both computationally and network-wise; if the host doesn't have a powerful machine, solid bandwidth, and low latency, everyone's experience suffers. You need a really powerful machine to do all that and deliver a high-framerate 3D experience to the host player at the same time. And if anything gets disrupted on the host's end--they tab out to check email, or a scheduled virus scan kicks in, or their roommate starts watching Netflix--everybody's experience suffers.

And then of course a lot of modern games don't allow player-owned servers at all, dedicated or otherwise. That's an entirely different set of poor decisions, though.

I remember even Warcraft 3 still worked that way, so the mechanism just disappered in the last 5 years or so. I don't know the technical details/reasonings behind that, but from a gamer perspective, here are my guesses:

- The player need to be able to actually "host" the game, that means port forwarding if you're behind a NAT (which is pretty much 100% of the players). I think for Warcraft 3, if you're playing the ranked 1v1 game, both of you connect to the Battle.net host, but in order to create a custom game, you always need to enable port forwarding. The process, needless to say, is not easy for the majority of the users.

- The playing experience greatly depends on the host's connection speed, and his location to the rest of the players.

- Cheating. When a player acts as a central server, it's a lot easier for that player to modify the game state and force it upon everyone else.

Consoles these days don't have a whole lot of left over power. By the time they're done running graphics and physics, there's not a lot of CPU left over to deal with running a server and sending out updates to everyone. That means if you get stuck being the host player, you're going to have a worse experience then everyone else.

Civilization V does this in multiplayer games, only thing is that you can continue without the other player if you'd like - and a computer player takes over instead. The other player can then either join the game you're keeping alive or start hosting again.

Almost every single console multiplayer game runs the server on a consumer console. Most, but not all, support host migration.

Host migration is a bitch. It sucks. You do not want to be the sucker tasked with making it work.

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