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The Valve and Steam Platform Discussion Thread
- Thread starter Morgoth
- Start date
His company is called three donkeys. Obvious jackass animal fucker.
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- May 25, 2006
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- 8,363
Isn't the problem with Artifact that it's not grindy enough to appeal to milennials? Sounds like a talented designer who has been throwing pearls before swine.
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- Jun 7, 2012
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- 3,171
Thank you for putting it into words. My friend group felt the same.
"Advantage in Multiplayer Games: Paying for things that give an advantage in a competitive game is something that I believe can be done in a way that is not abusive – but one has to be careful."
I would not be surprised if this hack lands a job at EA.
I would not be surprised if this hack lands a job at EA.
Multi-headed Cow
Arcane
That was one of the common complaints, yeah. Also that it wasn't free to play and was "Pay to win" since if you wanted to play competitive constructed you'd need cards, even though they added ways to play pauper and peasant within the client if you wanted cheap play and there was free draft play. I'm curious to see what they'll do though. If they set it to free to play, if they set it to buy to play (If you get the game you get all the cards), or if they just sweep it under the rug and never talk about it like Ricochet. I'm hoping whatever they do ends up with people playing it since it's a cool game.
LESS T_T
Arcane
- Joined
- Oct 5, 2012
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- 13,582
Devil may cry.
#10 - Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
#9 - Sid Meier's Civilization VI: Gathering Storm
#8 - Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege - Year 4 Pass
#7 - IEM 2019 Katowice CS:GO Major Championship Viewer Pass
#6 - PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS
#5 - Grand Theft Auto V
#4 - Devil May Cry 5
#3 - Dawn of Man
#2 - Devil May Cry 5
#1 - Devil May Cry 5
LESS T_T
Arcane
- Joined
- Oct 5, 2012
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LESS T_T
Arcane
- Joined
- Oct 5, 2012
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https://venturebeat.com/2019/03/14/...link-anywhere-and-better-networking-features/
They say they're also working on ways to provide the solutions for dedicated servers.
They say they're also working on ways to provide the solutions for dedicated servers.
GrainWetski
Arcane
- Joined
- Oct 17, 2012
- Messages
- 5,498
I'm glad you didn't link eurogaymer's link about it
They begin with
And end with
Those are 2 of the 5 short paragraphs in the article. True professionals.
They begin with
And end with
Those are 2 of the 5 short paragraphs in the article. True professionals.
Valve has pushed out the Steamworks networking update.
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamworks/announcements/detail/1791775741704351698Steamworks - New networking APIs for developers/Access to the Valve network - Better security, improved connectivity, lower latency and open source.
For the past few years we have been working on improving the quality of multiplayer experiences in DotA and CS:GO by relaying the traffic and carrying it on our network backbone. This protects our gameservers from denial-of-service attacks and gives players all over the world a lower-latency, higher-quality connection.
Today we are releasing APIs that make this service available to all Steam partners. This gives you:
- Access to our network, giving your players protection from attack, 100% reliable NAT traversal, and improved connectivity.
- Tools for instantly estimating the ping between two arbitrary hosts without sending any packets.
- A high quality end-to-end encrypted reliable-over-UDP protocol.
These updates are available as part of the Steamworks SDK v1.44 release, available now.
Access to the Valve network
Valve has relays deployed in 30 network points-of-presence worldwide and several terabits of edge bandwidth. Using these APIs, you can take advantage of this infrastructure. Relaying your game traffic over our network gives you several benefits.
First, relaying traffic anonymizes it, protecting both gameservers and clients from denial-of-service attacks. Furthermore, because routing decisions are made dynamically by the client, if a relay becomes unavailable, clients can switch to a different relay within seconds, perhaps at a different point-of-presence if necessary. For an attacker to disrupt gameplay, they must mount an attack large enough to overwhelm multiple data centers.
Second, clients can select a route that gets off of the public Internet and onto our dedicated links as early as possible. On our backbone we can ensure that the routing is optimal, since we have peered with over 2,500 ISPs. We also prioritize the latency-sensitive game traffic over HTTP content downloads, which we can afford to do because game traffic makes up a relatively small percentage of our overall bandwidth utilization. And on our backbone, a sudden surge of traffic unrelated to gaming won’t degrade the experience.
Finally, by relaying the traffic in software, we can often improve the ping time!
How can a relayed route be faster than a direct route? The Internet is a packet-switched network; there is no such thing as a “direct” route. When a packet is sent “directly” to the remote host's IP address, it takes the route determined by standard IP routing protocols. This route is often not optimal! Our protocol puts the client in charge of routing decisions. The client considers each relay point-of-presence, and determines the end-to-end latency along this route. It then selects the route with the lowest latency.
Giving clients their choice of route makes a difference surprisingly often. Based on a sample of 16M connections from unique client IP addresses to dedicated servers in our data centers:
- 43% of players experienced an improvement in their ping time.
- 25% of players experienced an improvement of 10ms or more
- 10% of players experienced an improvement of 40ms or more.
The amount of improvement varies considerably by region. Here is a breakdown by region.
Ping estimation tools
The ISteamNetworkingUtils API includes tools for estimating pings, powered by the relay network. By measuring the ping times to many different relays, we generate “coordinates” that describe the location of the host on the Internet. Given any two such sets of coordinates, we can generate a high-quality estimate for the ping time between two arbitrary hosts, without sending any packets. This is an extremely useful feature for matchmaking and peer selection.
Open-Source end-to-end protocol
In addition to the features powered by Valve’s relay network and backbone that Steam partners can access, the SteamnetworkingSockets API is also a general-purpose transport library for games, with the following features:
Fragmentation, reassembly, and retransmission. In your code you send and receive “messages”, which can be smaller or larger than a network packet. The protocol combines multiple small messages into a single packet for efficiency, fragments large messages into multiple packets, reassembles them on the receiving side, and retransmits segments of reliable messages that are dropped due to packet loss.
Encryption and authentication. Security is not an optional afterthought for a modern networked game; a vulnerability can destroy the experience for your players. Doing crypto properly is really hard. We took state-of-the art standards for reliable streams and applied them to the unreliable messages used by games. Out-of-the box, the encryption will protect against casual eavesdropping. To protect against a man-in-the-middle attack requires a trusted third party to issue certificates or distribute a shared secret. Steam does this for Steam games; in order for an attacker to eavesdrop or modify packets, they must be inside the game process, where VAC can detect them.
These basic features are also available in an open-source version[github.com] of this API. We want developers to take full advantage of the other benefits this API provides, and they cannot do that without the confidence that comes from having access to the source code for free.
More to come
This is the first of a series of updates aimed at improving the networked gaming experience for Steam partners. Specifically, while this update has primarily improved peer-to-peer networking, we're also working on making the solutions we have developed for our own dedicated servers available to partners. Let us know if you have any questions, and check out our plans for the future of the open-source project on github.
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LESS T_T
Arcane
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- Oct 5, 2012
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Well looks like Valve failed to catch the next big thing, that was born from their own game: https://venturebeat.com/2019/03/14/dota-auto-chess-heads-to-mobile-without-the-dota/
LESS T_T
Arcane
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Valve introduced another device to ward off "irrelevant" review bombs, now they will identify "off-topic review bombs," and remove them from the review score: https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1808664240333155775
How to identify that? AI? No, *gasp* manual moderation from Valve team, aided by automatic detection. They define an off-topic review bomb as "one where the focus of those reviews is on a topic that we consider unrelated to the likelihood that future purchasers will be happy if they buy the game." Still vague, yeah.
If you don't like this new system, you can opt out.
How to identify that? AI? No, *gasp* manual moderation from Valve team, aided by automatic detection. They define an off-topic review bomb as "one where the focus of those reviews is on a topic that we consider unrelated to the likelihood that future purchasers will be happy if they buy the game." Still vague, yeah.
If you don't like this new system, you can opt out.
User Reviews Revisited
Some time ago we made some changes to how we presented the User Reviews for games, and their resulting Review Score. We talked about those changes in this blog post. As we describe in that post, we want to ensure that players who've played a game can voice their opinions about why other people should or shouldn't buy the game, and that our summary of those opinions into a single Review Score should represent the likelihood that a future purchaser will be happy with their purchase.
Since that post, we've continued to listen to feedback from both players and developers. It's clear to us that players value reviews highly, and want us to ensure they're accurate and trustworthy. Developers understand that they're valuable to players, but want to feel like they're being treated fairly. We've also spent a bunch of time building analysis tools to help us better understand what's happening in the reviews across all titles on Steam. With that feedback and data in hand, we think we're ready to make another change.
That change can be described easily: we're going to identify off-topic review bombs, and remove them from the Review Score.
But while easy to say, it raises a bunch of questions, so let's dig into the details. First, what do we mean by an off-topic review bomb? As we defined back in our original post, a review bomb is where players post a large number of reviews in a short period of time, aimed at lowering the Review Score of a game. We define an off-topic review bomb as one where the focus of those reviews is on a topic that we consider unrelated to the likelihood that future purchasers will be happy if they buy the game, and hence not something that should be added to the Review Score.
Obviously, there's a grey area here, because there's a wide range of things that players care about. So how will we identify these off-topic review bombs? The first step is a tool we've built that identifies any anomalous review activity on all games on Steam in as close to real-time as possible. It doesn't know why a given game is receiving anomalous review activity, and it doesn't even try to figure that out. Instead, it notifies a team of people at Valve, who'll then go and investigate. We've already run our tool across the entire history of reviews on Steam, identifying many reasons why games have seen periods of anomalous review activity, and off-topic review bombs appear to only be a small number of them.
Once our team has identified that the anomalous activity is an off-topic review bomb, we'll mark the time period it encompasses and notify the developer. The reviews within that time period will then be removed from the Review Score calculation. As before, the reviews themselves are left untouched - if you want to dig into them to see if they're relevant to you, you'll still be able to do so. To help you do that, we've made it clear when you're looking at a store page where we've removed some reviews by default, and we've further improved the UI around anomalous review periods.
Finally, we've also enabled you to opt out of this entirely, if that's your preference - there's now a checkbox in your Steam Store options where you can choose to have off-topic review bombs still included in all the Review Scores you see.
While we're working on some other features around User Reviews, we thought this one was worth shipping by itself. As always, if you have thoughts or concerns, feel free to voice them in the comments below.
Q&A
Q: I care about some things that I worry other players don't, like DRM or EULA changes. Review bombs have been about them in the past. Do you consider them unrelated or off-topic?
A: We had long debates about these two, and others like them. They're technically not a part of the game, but they are an issue for some players. In the end, we've decided to define them as off-topic review bombs. Our reasoning is that the "general" Steam player doesn't care as much about them, so the Review Score is more accurate if it doesn't contain them. In addition, we believe that players who do care about topics like DRM are often willing to dig a little deeper into games before purchasing - which is why we still keep all the reviews within the review bombs. It only takes a minute to dig into those reviews to see if the issue is something you care about.
Q: So if I post a review inside in the period of an off-topic review bomb, my review won't be included in the Review Score?
A: Unfortunately, this is correct. We've tested our process of identifying off-topic review bombs on the entire history of reviews on Steam, and in doing so, we've found that while we can look through reviews and community discussions to determine what's behind the review bomb, it isn't feasible for us to read every single review. But as we mentioned back in our first User Review post, our data shows us that review bombs tend to be temporary distortions, so we believe the Review Score will still be accurate, and other players will still be able to find and read your review within the period.
karoliner
Arcane
People really need to read that entire update. Because it states explicitly that games which have been subjected to this manual modern will receive a notice stating so on the game's page, and you are free to opt out of having the review score altered by this moderation, those reviews won't be deleted.
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- Oct 26, 2012
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- 5,353
I mean, review actually being a review is not a bad thing in itself when you look at how many are just "game didn't run for me" or some phrase from the game. Both of those cases are useless in the context of being a review. Only problem is moderation butthurt can easily creep into this system if Valve actually doesn't play it straight and gives into all this crazy talk about toxicity or whatever.
Black
Arcane
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- May 8, 2007
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- 1,873,181
But only of them translates into people buying more stuff, giving valve more money.
Yeah, nobody complains about positive stuff.
Like those reviews "I played for one hour so far and just wanna say it's so fucking good, will update later" - but never does.
学习中文，傻逼
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