Barrier to (multiplayer) entry?

[nitpik]

Hi all - first time poster here.

First, I think AI war is an amazing game. My steam account is up to 485 hours, and I just started playing again after a few months off with the new expansion.

Second, I spent at least half of that time playing coop with a friend. We're both in our late 30s, have spent a lot of time playing strategy games (board and computer), and love the game. Neither of us are IT people, but we've both been playing computer games for 20 years, have spent plenty of time connecting LANs and manually setting TCP/IP addresses, and it still took us quite some time to figure out Port Forwarding on one or both of our machines. And every time we took a few months break and then started another game, something would have changed on one of our systems, and we'd spend half on hour or more playing around with firewall settings, anti-virus settings, configuring routers, etc..... before it would work again.

So with the new expansion I persuaded a second friend of mine to buy the game. Sure enough, she installs, tries to connect to me, can't. After 45 minutes, during which the excitement of playing a new game is steadily waning, we figure out what setting on my router has changed, and also that she has to turn something in her Mcaffee off.

She has a good enough time playing to persuade a couple of her friends to buy AI War on the Thanksgiving sale. But now to host her own game she needs to learn how to configure her router, which turns out to require a password that her roommate has, and he is out of the apartment that day, etc....

These all sound like silly problems once you know the solution, but I'm sure you all know at least one person who will not follow links to websites to learn how to configure their router in order to play a game, and instead will just go do something else.

Maybe I'm getting lazy with age, or maybe I'm being spolied by Valve, but after playing Portal 2 or Orcs Must Die 2 where you just open Steam, click the "invite friend" button, and your friend is in your game, I'm left thinking of configuring firewall and router settings as a significant barrier to entry. And suggesting downloading and installing Hamachi as a solution is a similar barrier.

Again, I'm not a programmer, so please tell me if this is a silly request. But how much programming would it require to integrate AI War multiplayer with Steam? To the extent that you could invite someone to a game from your Steam friends list and they would just appear in the lobby? No Port Forwarding, no playing with anti-virus software, etc...?

I'm asking because I suspect there may be a lot of people who would love this game, and would love to play multiplayer, but will not spend the time required to learn how to connect with their friends. And the co-op multiplayer in AI War is an amazing experience - I still can't think of any other strategy game that you can play with friends in the same way and have the same type of challenge.

And I'm curious to hear if other people's experiences with connecting in multiplayer were the same as mine. Did it take most of you an hour or more to connect the first time you tried? Or is it just me and my friends??

[Minotaar]

Hi, welcome to the forums  Yeah, I've had mostly the same experiences as you - every time I start a new coop game, something has broken somewhere in the past six months or so

[Draco18s]

And now you know why my machine is the DMZ Host on my network.
(Port forwarding, who needs port forwarding?  ALL non-forwarded ports go to my machine...)

Technically it's a security risk, but seriously, what hacker is going to try and get into a private network with home computers behind it.  It's way easier to just email a virus.

[Oralordos]

Meh, I have no idea what the Steam API has for that kind of integration so even though I am a programmer I don't know how hard something like that would be.

For my multiplayer games, little as they are, I always host. I have one port that I opened for another game and since then I have always adjusted all my games to use that one port. I've not really had any problems since as long as I am the host.

[keith.lamothe]

Welcome to the forums

It would be non-trivial to implement steamworks multiplayer for AIW, yea, but the other big question is: where does that leave our non-steam customers?  Granted, that's a minority of our user-base, and I've thought of using steamworks stuff to improve other parts of the experience even though it wouldn't benefit everyone, but I do really wonder what the customer perception is of "the game also has awesome support for A, B, and C, but only if you use it through distributor's platform Z" situations.

[nitpik]

Thank you for responding! I understand the concern about distribution platforms - I  wanted to use Steam as an example because I think it handles friends lists and multiplayer connectivity really smoothly. And I assumed it would be easier to integrate AI War with steamworks than to develop your own system from scratch.

Tyber, Draco, what you're both describing is exactly the sort of thing that my (admittedly limited) pool of gaming friends would have no idea how to do .

Again, I really enjoy the game, have managed to solve each connection problem as it came up (so far), and am willing to spend the time to continue do so in the future. But do you hear from people who have tried and failed?

[Mánagarmr]

There's always the option to use Hamachi to bypass any port forwarding needs. Set up a small network through Hamachi and play with the LAN option from within AI:War. Granted, it's not easy to do either, but it's tons of less work than trying to work out how to port forward if you have no idea what you are doing. It's easier to just install Hamachi and join the network with a password than figuring your router out

[keith.lamothe]

I  wanted to use Steam as an example because I think it handles friends lists and multiplayer connectivity really smoothly.

I agree that it does a great job.  My wife and I regularly play multiplayer on a few different games with her sister and brother-in-law who are a few thousand miles away.  Dungeon Defenders uses steamworks MP and it just works.  Torchlight 2 for MP options only has Internet or LAN (no direct-IP like AIW supports) and the Internet option's lobby relies on servers run by the developer (Runic) and while in general it works ok (and the game itself is awesome) we very frequently cannot all see each other in the list and it takes a lot of frustrating retries (particularly when someone gets disconnected for whatever reason).  I definitely see why one experience is preferred over the other

And I assumed it would be easier to integrate AI War with steamworks than to develop your own system from scratch.

Yea, it's basically not feasible to do so at all in our case.  The fundamental problem is that individual customer computers default to not trusting each other (which is wise, since so high a percent of internet traffic is malicious) and will not trust each other on a particular port unless specifically told to do so.  That's easier on the client side but server-side it requires port forwarding and/or whatever.  The solution provided by steamworks or other multiplayer platforms like that is to provide their own servers as go-betweens; customer machines are clients and still have to trust their platform servers (not difficult) and their servers have to be set up to trust the appropriate traffic (customers don't have to do that work).  But then it's all up to the quality of the platform.  If Runic can't make it work consistently for Torchlight 2, I don't have a lot of confidence we could solve all the similar problems we would face with the level of resources available to us.

Which is why steamworks multiplayer makes so much sense: Valve has solved those problems, at least to the extent that I've never had an issue with it.  Though I don't play stuff that uses it super often.

FWIW we do have a multiplayer server list of sorts for both Tidalis and AVWW, but the actual connection between customers is still 100% handled between the two of them, our servers only allow servers to advertise themselves and clients to request that list of advertisements and give them a "connect" button that's basically the same as using direct-IP to connect to the target (it doesn't even tell our servers who you try to connect to).  Periodically someone asks for the same thing for AIW but honestly you'd almost never see an open game since the time spent setting up is like 2% of the time spent playing, and while it's reasonably popular for a 3+ year old game it's not that popular.

But do you hear from people who have tried and failed?

We periodically hear from folks with trouble connecting, and Chris helps them out (he knows a ton about networking), and I don't recall offhand someone just saying that they give up but it's probably happened.  And undoubtedly there's tons of people who just never go to the bother of asking on a forum and just give up.

Anyway, to answer in general: you're correct in that the situation is far from ideal.  It's just about the best we can do for now   And in general folks are happy with the products.

[nitpik]

That all makes sense, and again, I appreciate the response. And I will continue to evangelize for AI War the way it is now

[zoutzakje]

heh yeah, this is pretty much the reason why I usually play AIW solo only. When I first got this game, I had no idea how to play multiplayer. I asked how port forwarding works and Chris explained well how it worked, gave me a few links too. So the next few hours I spend reading the links, learning everything I needed to know about port forwarding. Only to find out there's a password on our router which my dad was not willing to give. I just use Hamachi ever since. It generally works. Still a lot of trouble though.
I'm all in favor of steamworks, even though I'd feel kinda bad for the people who don't have steam. But stil, that's only a minority of our community (I think).
If I didn't have steam, I wouldn't mind either. It would be a reason for me to get steam, which is a free application anyways.

[onyhow]

@zoutzakje: Some people don't exactly like Steam...I'm in favor of Steamworks too, but consider that there's non-Steam players there it might not cover all the case...(minority or not, they're still players)