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There has been lots of problems with observers lately: more observers increase the lag, and this create a rift between players who want to play lag free and tourmanents organizers who want more streams.
But having more observers *should* not increase the lag. I think in one of the patch, the UDP protocol was implemented for starcraft 2, and since you don't care about freeze/desync for observers, you could just send the data to the udp sockets for every observers. You would just use TCP for your opponent and an eventual referee.
(And since you don't expect data from the observers, you don't need to poll their sockets, so the latency should not change at all).
I am a bit surprised that Blizzard did not implement it that way, if they are serious about esport, the first thing that need to be done is a nice environment for online tournaments.
This is really the basic! I was actually expecting them to go further and offer a streaming environment like there was for WC3 with waaghtv or ggtv: you set up a relay obs that stream the data of the game to other clients. If players are worried about replays being leaked, you could set it up so that only clients with enough privilege can access to the data stream. Then these streamers can relay it through conventional video streams. This would allow for a more flexible approach, not having to wait for all the observers to come in the game. And since tournaments have to be endorsed by blizzard, this would make sense if they offer relay informations for endorsed tournaments in the sc2 lobby.
Another thing that should be implemented in order to prevent controversy is the ability to restart a game for a checkpointed position in a replay. This is the only manner to be completely fair in case of a disconnection of one of the player, and since there are checkpoints already this should not be hard to implement.
All in all I am a bit disappointed by the lack of feature for esports in SC2. Everyone is talking about the missing chat channels, but the preceding features are important too, and would help alleviate a lot of controversy. What do you think? Am I missing something?
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I have seen this done in other games, and SC2 with obs felt slower... And I knew they shouldn't really effect it, so that's probably why.
I am really speachless at the path that B.net is taking. It definetly is missing the most obvious and easy to implement feutures. So this leaves me to wonder, what's the problem:
-Blizz B.net staff aren't very educated
-Takes up too much to do, and rather work on something more important
-Do you really want chatrooms idea
Too much stuff is missing, and to be honest, Im starting to doubt the Blizz team. They are just so slow with implementing relatively easy things to do; from my perspective atleast. Another thing that bugs me, is they say they are listening to the community, but some of their decisions are unbearable.
Chatrooms, I cannot understand why they wouldn't implement something so easy... I just feel their dodging some really important things. Maybe I just don't know anything, but many others have an opinion like me.
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War3 I loved joining random OBS games as well. It was a fun way to tell some jokes while watching some good players. However this feature is another issue with the custom map setup.Battle net has a long way to go.
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Yeah, i agree that the current system where if an observer lags it slows down the game is really poor. It even happened during the TLO vs MadFrog showmatch.
I can only imagine that the engine doesn't allow for it. It would be a huge improvement if they could resolve the issue
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This thread needs some love from R1CH.
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I agree that observers should not lag games especially tournament ones by all means. I remember there was a pic of GOMTV Dcing in a tournament match around here lol.
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what SC2 needs is first party implemented WAAAAGHTV.
No discussion.
This would solve everything, unlimited DELAYED streams, so your opponent can't cheat.
Everybody could watch the game themselves without streams and opponents wouldn't notice any lag.
But hey they rather implement name changes, coz you can charge for that.
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On August 17 2010 11:06 Kexx wrote:
what SC2 needs is first party implemented WAAAAGHTV.
No discussion.
This would solve everything, unlimited DELAYED streams, so your opponent can't cheat.
Everybody could watch the game themselves without streams and opponents wouldn't notice any lag.
But hey they rather implement name changes, coz you can charge for that.
Its a business like any other sadly, money comes first. Maybe they're on to it but progress has been slow? :S
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Very good suggestion but I don't think blizzard's BNET team will go for it because they're idiots.
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On August 17 2010 11:06 Kexx wrote:
what SC2 needs is first party implemented WAAAAGHTV.
No discussion.
This would solve everything, unlimited DELAYED streams, so your opponent can't cheat.
Everybody could watch the game themselves without streams and opponents wouldn't notice any lag.
I am pretty sure we will see it, if not from Blizzard, at last from a third party addon. Name change is really easy to implement, and the no-delay from observers, or start a game from a replay should only be a bit harder. I am really hopping to see that soon.
Chat channel and a waaaghtv-like system are a bit harder, so I don't mind not having it right now, but this definitely should be implemented some time in the future. Of course, there would still be a need for Video streaming for the casual public and those who want to watch matches without having sc2.
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I have to agree that this is a problem, as occasionally everyone's connection hiccups. It's embarrassing when a caster lags his players' games. If you're streaming 4 hours or more at a time, at some point in that stream you are almost certainly going to have a brief problem. There should absolutely be a method of relaying information to a spectator without affecting the players in the match.
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If you got disconnected, what happened in BW? At the moment, we also have no LAN so even if you played close, you still relied on battle.net to be stable.
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I agree with everything the OP said. While I'm no programmer this seems to me like it might be more difficult to implement than it sounds, and frankly there are a lot of bnet features that are still glaringly missing. (chat channels anyone?)
But still the bottom line is that this should have been designed this way from the beginning. But that's unfortunately what you get when you put the Xbox live guy in charge of a PC gaming platform.
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It unbelievable that Blizzard has spent so much on this game and yet battle.net 2.0 is terrible.
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At some point Blizzard has to make it so observers can not cause lag, because OP is pretty much correct. However, the bnet dev team seems to be understaffed, underfunded, or just pretty bad at design/programming, and the easiest way to make the game "just work" is to sync everyone involved in a game.
It's a safe assumption that this will eventually be fixed, however.
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i wish there was a way to play ladder and a friend could observe the match(your view only), just by rightclicking on your name and going to join game, or by being in your party while u start 1v1 ladder. Would be a good way to train people and entertaining and better than watching a stream.
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They should try to implement something like HLTV.
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Agreed with OP: 1. Observing made lag-less. 2. Resume game from replay.
Moreover, it is possible to re-stream the game environment itself, not just video, so that everyone at home gets to view the game live as they wish to control the camera. If it is a must to not share replays, still some limited game environment without players hotkeys and players view could be available.
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On September 06 2010 09:34 figq wrote:
Agreed with OP: 1. Observing made lag-less. 2. Resume game from replay.
Moreover, it is possible to re-stream the game environment itself, not just video, so that everyone at home gets to view the game live as they wish to control the camera. If it is a must to not share replays, still some limited game environment without players hotkeys and players view could be available.
to your second point. shouldnt be such a big problem. the game could send all the data stream to its server with a pid. and people who connected to that pid recieve the data and therefore the "game". some kind of realtime replay.
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The people working on bnet aren't understaffed or underfunded--they just have the wrong priorities :\ If their director pointed them in the right direction they could crank this stuff out.
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EPT
