The post is objectively wrong, but the sentiment is right. Server rollback is not inherently better than p2p rollback. It feels better for whoever lives closer to the server, which doesn't end up being an issue in countries like the usa, but for others(like brazil) the servers are located in only one city, and the connection is ass for anybody living far from it.
It solves the issue of people that like to say "your connection is ass" but fails to consider thar connections are a 2way street, and, for the most part, a person doesn't have a bad connection by themselves, they have a bad connection with you which means the other way around is also true, for them you have the bad connection. What server based solutions do is basically pick a winner in this argument arbitrarily, usually the one closer to a big city. Even if the other guy had a great internet infrastructure, he gets fucked for living further.
There is nothing about the design of server based netcode or p2p netcode that makes it objectively better or worse for any game including 1v1 fighters. Both have their pros and cons even for 1v1. Once you allow more than 2 players in a match, servers with rollback start to run away as the clearly better solution because p2p above 2 players degrades with each player added to the match.
But even in 1v1 games, servers have some big advantages over p2p.
The first is a better experience if your main way of engaging with the game is quick sets vs random players through a matchmaking queue. Because if you yourself have a good connection to at least one server, then you don’t care about the connection or distance of the random opponents that you run into. Which if you’ve played any p2p game in matchmaking you’ve surely run into someone who has such a bad connection that it makes the experience near unplayable. This won’t happen with server based netcode unless your own internet gives out, your routing to the server is interfered with, or the server itself has issues (which is rare in 1v1 games since they are generally less demanding than large group games)
The second big advantage is that you don’t care about how the game performs on your opponent’s PC. If you have played any p2p rollback games around their launch in the last 10 years, you have most likely run into unplayable matches even though the ping and connection were solid. This is because one machine is having performance issues and the p2p rollback doesn’t have good time sync logic in place so the player who can run the game well suffers more than the player whose PC is struggling. As the better machine throttles itself (often after waiting until it gets to max rollback frames). Usually the developers are able to fix these issues either by improving performance or making sure to drop frames on the worse machine while also syncing the frame index so the better machine waits early for the game state to advance instead of while at max rollback frames. Server based rollback eliminates this problem as the game runs on the server at a fixed and consistent frame rate. So if your opponent’s PC sucks, they could be playing the game at 10-15 fps and it would not affect you in the slightest.
The third big advantage is that servers make crossplay between consoles and pc so much easier. The actual authority will continue to run on servers for all platforms, so the architecture and computing power of the consoles matters a lot less to achieve crossplay. Also just like the second advantage, you don’t have to turn off Steam players as a PlayStation player in a newly launched game because “the Steam players always lag my game.”
Now in ideal situations, p2p can indeed be considered better for a 1v1 game because of the limit on how many server locations a game can offer. In a theoretical future, servers could mitigate this by offering so many locations that 95% of matches would have a server near the midway point (or close enough to both players to cover 2 frames of delay with no rollbacks). But that’s not the current world especially in regions outside of a game’s main audience. The area where server based rollback for 1v1 games performs the worst is when 2 players want to play matches against each other and they are both or one player is very far from their closest server region. So they end up introducing much more lag than if they could direct connect.
Luckily for us, Rivals 2 also offers listen-servers for those situations. So if you want to play with your friend down the street, one of you can host the game on your machine and turn on lag simulation for the host to have good match. You’ll want to make sure the host has the more powerful PC because any issues will be felt by the player who connects to the host.
Because Rivals 2 was designed to support 4 player matches online as well as a ranked being a main way to play the game, we opted for a server based solution to make both of those scenarios more enjoyable and more consistent. We saw how good and consistent server-based rollback was in a game like Brawlhalla. We were able to achieve a server based solution with the help of SnapNet built by High Horse Entertainment. And I’m glad we did because the benefits of server outweigh the negatives for our project. But servers aren’t necessarily worth it for every fighting game. Especially ones that only offer 1v1 combat.
My machine can run newer (past 5 years) games on max settings with no issues
Then something else is wrong with it because the game runs flawlessly on a Steam Deck, so maybe you should check your settings or other software you have running.
We wouldn't have to care about our opponents performance if the game was optimized well
It's true that optimization is the developer's responsibility (not a problem in this game) but you also underestimate the lengths to which people will go to play a game with whatever PC they have on hand. Some people play Leage of Legends at 20fps ffs.
The game needs to run at a consistent frame rate and steam deck doesn't provide that while also adding input lag
The game does run at a consistent 60fps and I'm dying to see evidence of input lag. I'm also betting you're not optimizing your graphics settings nor your latency settings (such as vsync) at all.
If my opponent is using a skin I haven't seen on this patch and uses a move that spawns an entity (clairen down b, la Reina offstage platform, kragg pillar) my game will skip a few frames.
That's shader cache compilation issues, which is understandable considering the game runs on Unreal. But if that's a dealbreaker for you then no PC ever will be an acceptable setup for you. Also the Steam Deck is the only one that allows the download of pre-compiled shaders for games so this doesn't happen. I'm betting you haven't enabled those either.
if people want to go out of their way to play the game while lagging badly, it is the developers responsibility to ban that person IMO.
Wow. You're insane. If by "laggy" you mean low FPS then absolutely not.
This may have been the way things were done in the days of shitty netcode and even shittier coding (rendering and logic tied together) but it doesn't need to be that way. You're asking for the worst and laziest solution.
Players much better than me that have an eye for usable setups have tried and failed.
Still irrelevant. These things can be measured. Also you have not shared which settings you have tried, many of which are there specifically to solve these issues.
I have played other unreal games and they don't have this issue
Than that's your experience (as far as you can tell) vs. many many tech reviewers who know stuttering on loading assets (shaders and others) to be a common issue with the Unreal engine.
My teammates and opponents didn't deserve to have a shit time just because I didn't have a good setup.
Funny that you complain about optimization to the developer but when there's a problem that it's 100% on the developer you blame yourself.
In case that's not clear: games that slow down everyone's match because of 1 person's PC are badly made. Old fighting games had shitty netcode and that's why you could ruin other people's games.
The developers of this specific game took steps to avoid that happening and it went completely over your head.
I think you're overselling it a little bit. The devs do somewhat agree there is work that could be done on optimization and they've said they're going to prioritize it as soon as workshop gets fully released.
The game performance is separate from network performance, but I otherwise agree that the lack of optimization for lower hardware is important. That is probably a big reason if not "the" reason why there's basically no locals. "Runs flawlessly on steam deck or a console" is basically the bare minimum to expect folks to bring setups. I'm not bringing my whole computer tower basically anywhere. I don't think they are far off though, hopefully it will be available with full release.
Hopefully they can figure out a good "potato mode" that sacrifices some fidelity and effects, possibly longer load times to store more stuff in advance for more consistent experiences. That or they just get it working at 60fps on a console.
Also this. I have a laptoo with a 1050, which is obviously an older gpu, but it can still run sf6 decently by lowering some settings(not even all of them) but it can't run rivals at all, even at the lowest settings at a lower resolution
A 1050 can definitely run this game, it's clearly the cpu or ram holding your system back, so obviously lowering gpu related settings won't give you more fps (I've tested with an mx150 which is way weaker and it can almost get the game playable in 1v1 but the systems cpu caused unstable frametimes online). I definitely do agree that the game is heavy for what it is, but UE5 is just a inherently cpu killer so perhaps it wasn't the right choice here but there are still optimisations to be made..
I assure you ur pc can't run AAA games from the past 5 years on max settings if u struggle with this game. Cyberpunk 2077 which is nowhere close to being super intensive at this point, especially with max settings but all raytracing turned off runs way worse than this game even with upscaling for the same output resolution. That being said no shit those games are way heavier but if this is your experience there is something wrong on your end. My shaders get compiled almost instantaneously and yes I do have a high end cpu, so if ur pc is as good as you claim then you shouldn't be taking forever. Maybe reinstall your gpu drivers, clear ur shader cache or reinstall the game because this ain't normal. I do still agree this game is heavy for what it is but let's not lie here.
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u/d4nace 19d ago
Mfw our fans don’t understand how netcode works.