A cloud verison of EQ.

The bigger problem is, what are you calling cheating?

Warping, duping, injections, etc. sure.

Boxing, broadcast commands, scripting characters? You just made it EASIER, if you sell multiple accounts to a single household I can write scripts to send commands to my characters and automate them. And now DBG doesn’t even get to run a sniffer on my machine to see what I’m running!

Most of what people call “hacks” in EQ would still work. Biggest one that would be stopped is Show EQ.

Here's a little info, it's definitely a concern for FPS games, etc. https://www.neogaf.com/threads/the-truth-about-cloud-gaming-performance-input-lag-analysis.1466852/

It's not that odd as some are making it out to be. Several MMO have existed on cloud systems. One of them was Tera Online that was ported to Gaikai's cloud service in 2012. (most played Tera on a local client though)

I actually played Tera online in the cloud for a few months. The game didn't exist on my PC at all. This was back in 2012.

The experience I had was actually pretty good. The only problem was that the visual quality was slightly less on Gaikai than on my local version of Tera. But otherwise I didn't notice any lag, I never had to download patches myself, it saved me a ton of room on my SSD and I could play the game on an older PC too, something that didn't work with the local client.

Gaikai was then bought by Sony. And part of PSNow on PC is based on Gaikai.

Pretty misleading by google. I didn't know cloud prevented a dev from creating a bug in the system that allows you to dupe items, kill a mob without being hit, or exploit something else.

People underestimate the ingenuity of others. There will always be a way to hack, steal, and cheat.

What I have tried is horrible. I mean, ok I’m on travel and don’t have access to my rig sure I can play through this single player game some. But the lag/artifacts/screen tearing etc. currently cloud gaming is not pushing forward for people who care about quality. It’s for people who want convenience and works much better in the single player space.

I don't think it's misleading. A dupe of an item is generally called an exploit and it's just a bug in the game.

Cloud gaming doesn't eliminate an unintended bug where you buy a loaf of bread and the vendor buys it back for twice the price.

But, what Google said is that cloud gaming eliminates hacking and cheating, and that is true. And we've had plenty of that in EQ. Things like warping, automated groups, people one shot killing raid mobs, etc. In FPS it would eliminate things like aimbots. All these hacks rely on positional data, mob data, basically they require access to the game's engine and files. But once your game is running on a cloud service, the positional data is no longer available to the client.

There have always been these things, and always will be in any multiplayer game.. But in fairness, the vast majority of exploiting in EQ has been through client modification or packet sniffing.

I am not in favor of moving EQ to a cloud system, I think it would be a mess. But let's not argue that they shouldn't try to eliminate some forms of exloiting, because there are other forms of exploiting that they can't eliminate.

What most people think are automated groups or “box armies” in EQ does not need client data So while true for most your other stuff, what EQ players are as “hacks” wouldn’t change much.

No, I mean actual automated groups. There were (are?) bot programs a few years ago on live servers where a group was tagging and pulling mobs all on their own without anyone at the keyboard.

That's only possible because someone figured out how the engine identifies where a mobs has spawned. They would never be able to do this if the game was running on a cloud service, since that data would never make it to the client.

There was also a hack where people could instantly port to a named in the zone, even to a raid mob, and they were somehow one-shotting them. I don't think they actually ever fixed that. But you now need to have X people in a raid zone before you get loot iirc. And the game checks how many people killed a certain mob, etc.

Show EQ would be stopped if the zone data wasn't transmitted to your client the instance you enter a zone or a new mob spawns. That all could be handled server side with a need to know routine to transmit it to the client when you actually get into visual range of the mobs. Plus the mob loot table (minus any visible holdable loot) should not be generated until the mob is looted instead of when the mob is spawned.

Pulling would be stopped, but you could put a group at named and automate out farming that. And most of what we see in TLP forums for “cheating”, “botting”, etc. Is not based on those type of things.

They could even start with encrypting the network traffic. Obviously not a lot of effort has went into stopping

The problem with this is that the client sometimes needs to know the location of mobs that are not in line of sight.

For instance, if you are casting paci on a mob from around the corner. Client needs to know the location of the mob to know if you are in cast range.

Same thing with healing a player from behind a wall. Can't see him, but it would be pretty game breaking to remove the ability to cast on him, and to cast on him your client has to know about him.

Also, with camera angles, you can often see mobs that aren't directly in line of signt of your character (for better or worse.) So the calculations would be pretty complicated to replicate this server side without changing the client experience. (And I certainly wouldn't want them to change the game so that you cannot use camera angles to see around the corner when pulling. At this late stage.)

They have tried this in the past. It is not very successful when people can write code that reads the key needed to decrypt the data directly from the client's memory.

In theory you could still hack a cloud service by breaking into the actual servers. But, the people who can actually hack into Google and Microsoft's servers are not the people trying to cheat in EQ or in games in general, they're state hacking groups who are busy with very very different things. And even if you manage to steal the game's code, you're still nowhere, because the server will still not send data in realtime. It's not in the realm of possibilities, for all intended purposes, it's impossible to hack a game running on the cloud.

Another reason I think this is rather interesting technology, is because it relieves the developers from having to run the servers.

MMO servers crashing, not being accessible, not having the hardware to deal with thousands of log-ins, would, for a large part, be a thing of the past.

It makes no sense that every developer has to run their own servers for their own game, when there are companies like Microsoft, Google, etc, that have giant data centers that can easily do it 10 times better.

Google said every client playing the game will have access to terabytes of memory. They said they can give clients as much memory as they really want, their data centers have terabytes of memory, it would allow developers to make games being 200GB or 400GB or 1TB in size, instead of 50GB.

Because users don't have to download the game anymore, and because these giant cloud data centers have massive amounts of memory, they can make the game client that now runs in the cloud, a much bigger size.

Interesting thought to chew on.

Not particularly practical anytime soon, I'd imagine.

You're talking about a technology that is at the absolute bleeding edge of development. Google Stadia hasn't even launched yet and other competing services are just barely getting off the ground, to various degrees of success. You'll notice that the premiere service from one of the richest tech companies in the world is just now announcing the existence of their platform sometime in the next year.

The "everything server-side" architecture you're suggesting be used is very different than a traditional cloud-deployment. If you take a look at some of the more common "SaaS" cloud-based offerings, like the Adobe Creative suite, you can find that most of these deployments still push ... pretty much everything off client-side. That's because building giant rendering farms to process data and then attempting to shove all that information through a pipeline isn't just extravagantly expensive - in most cases, we haven't even reached a point where it's practical.

In the Gaikai/Tera Online streaming example, Gaikai failed largely because it was released far too early. 2012 was not ready for the data requirements demanded by lag-free gaming.

tl;dr: The technology is still very new, and who knows where it will go in the next 5 years. It's definitely cool to think of a fully-streamed EQ sitting on a server somewhere, but probably not super practical in the near future... possibly ever.

Developers have been renting datasetver space for years. When I play FFXIV my web traffic didn’t go to Square-Enix in Japan or even in America. It went to a data center on the east cost. They had West Coast centers/East/EU/Asia. Guessing EQ just makes everyone in EU play on US based servers? But that problem is already solvable.

WoW does the same thing:
https://wow.gamepedia.com/Americas_region_realm_list_by_datacenter

Right. The Tera I played on Gaikai in 2012 was inferior in resolution than playing a local version of the game. I don't think this was due to my own internet, but due to Gaikai's inability to handle streaming HD content to so many clients at once. They were actively downscaling resolution, even though my internet could easily handle HD content.

This might explain why only major players are really getting into cloud gaming, like Google, Micrososft, Sony, Amazon, (even Wallmart now is talking about a cloud gaming launch). Very few companies have the money and robust data centers to be able to handle cloud gaming, it would at least be as data intensive as Netflix.

Netflix is hosted by Amazon. Your fun fact for the day.