Fixing the bandwidth issue

[TheUnknownPoet]

Why don't you guys just host your main downloads through a torrent? This way, your store won't crash as often, and everyone will share bandwidth.

[whatisthisidonteven]

Because they're unsecure.

[vexx32]

That, and I can think of a few other reasons:

Because someone's going to take the torrent file and hand it out to everyone, making it easier to pirate the game.

Because some ISPs block P2P traffic, meaning it would be impossible for some to get the game.

[LaydeeDem]

And some people don't like torrent software?

[togfox]

And its unsecured.

[bandit4910]

Torrents are not a fix for everything. Their more of a problem then a fix. Torrents are easily shared through torrent sites, thus making the game easier to pirate.

[softweir]

Anything can be easily shared through torrent sites - all the pirates have to do is make their own torrent of it. There have already been several torrents of KSP, thanks to some naughty people feeling "generous". (And a few trying to help with the bandwidth, but by not being actually helpful.)

What is insecure about torrents is that people can grab packets off the torrent without registering with the tracker - there are several clients that can maintain a torrent even when the tracker goes down, and it only took a small amount of extra work to create a client that can sneak in on the torrent and grab without needing the say-so of the server. Which means pirates who haven't even bought KSP would be able to grab a copy and pass it on. As it is, at least ONE pirate has to have bought it!

[TG_bigboss]

It is only because everyone gets click happy....i couldn't access the forums for 4-5 days because of it. The patcher just said screw it and gave up because of the traffic lol.

[untitled]

moar servers?

I think the KSP team should be able to get some more servers with the rising popularity of this game.

[phoenix_ca]

*shrug* Piracy is just a fact of life. It's in human nature to share things. And yes, it really goddamn sucks to see your hard work pirated, but really, those sales were already lost. (Not so much "lost" as "never existed in the first place".) Adjust your projections accordingly.

The more compelling reason to avoid torrents is the requirement of specialized software (no one-click from the browser and BAM! spacy-awesomeness), and as mentioned, that some ISPs (idiotically) block P2P traffic. (I say idiotically because the user's behavior is their own business. A phone company isn't liable for when someone uses a phone to order a murder, robbery, riot, or otherwise, so why should an ISP be liable for a client using their cables to nab software? That and BitTorrent is one of the most progressive and efficient means of disseminating large amounts of data to many people at very low cost. Our networks would probably collapse if all those TBs of data were sent from server-client.)

In short, the "easier to pirate" argument is invalid, as the increased difficulty of getting the software via more conventional means is trivial, at best. DRM is similarly trivial in it's application, unless you go balls-to-the-wall with it like Ubisoft does, and at that point, you're degrading the experience of your customers, so it shows a rather strong lack of regard for the people paying one's salary.

My favorite part of KSP: When I got my hands on it (and I won't say how), I wanted to pay for it. I saw the potential and just said "hell, take my damn money already". And ta-da, here I am, happily playing, serving as a guinea pig for the devs to work out any bugs and make improvements, wishing I wasn't a broke student so I could afford to pay more.

[AcidRoot]

Not sure if this has been tried/suggested yet but they could host the downloads on Amazon's S3 service. So it could scale to meet demand though the higher the scale the more expensive it gets. I guess in the end it would come down to how much money it costs for S3 VS how much money they lose when the site's down.

[wired2thenet]

Considering what's available on TPB, torrents are a very bad idea (although I personally would welcome it for the download speeds, it's a killer for 99% of games out there. I know of only one that's actually benefited from it).

[crusaderuk]

I already put forward a similar suggestion in another thread Click here for it , although not using torrents.

[whatisthisidonteven]

moar servers?

I think the KSP team should be able to get some more servers with the rising popularity of this game.

One of the devs on IRC said half of KSP's income is already going to the upkeep of this server.

Edited September 24, 2012 by whatisthisidonteven

[bandit4910]

They should bring back more donates to the devs. As in before you could donate as much money as you had. They changed the thing to lock on 18 dollars. They should open up another thing on the store for donations. Also, don't they make money from google ads?

[Stevenator1]

I certainly think that a more prominent donate feature should be implemented into the website, promoting people to donate to keep the game going. In addition, another way to implement that is a "Pay as much as you want" system, but $18+ to unlock the full version.

And back to torrents, (I have previously suggested this to the devs in IRC) I do support a peer 2 peer based download, but what if you made a custom program that authenticated with the auth server before connecting to the p2p stream? In addition, you could have that auther download the watermarked file that the devs were interested in adding, and then use p2p to download everything else.

[TheUnknownPoet]

I certainly think that a more prominent donate feature should be implemented into the website, promoting people to donate to keep the game going. In addition, another way to implement that is a "Pay as much as you want" system, but $18+ to unlock the full version.

And back to torrents, (I have previously suggested this to the devs in IRC) I do support a peer 2 peer based download, but what if you made a custom program that authenticated with the auth server before connecting to the p2p stream? In addition, you could have that auther download the watermarked file that the devs were interested in adding, and then use p2p to download everything else.

Alright, so then KSP simply sets up private tracker that only authenticated legitimately purchased users. Simple. -.-

[Majiir]

One of the devs on IRC said half of KSP's income is already going to the upkeep of this server.

Yes, and the discussion quickly turned into "you're spending waay too much, get these servers instead and solve all problems for a quarter of the price." I've previously offered the considerable bandwidth available to my server as a KSP mirrorâ€â€so I'm not particularly sympathetic to the "it's too expensive" line.

[EDIT] To expand on that, I'm saying there's a decision-making problem, not a cost problem. I suspect the launch day/week slowdowns aren't considered a very big problem by Squad. That said, high server costs should be at the front of their mind, so I do hope work is underway on moving to a cheaper solution.

Edited September 28, 2012 by Majiir

[samstarman5]

If you would like to see better service out of Squad's servers, then donate a bit more than just the base price of the game as well as encourage others, too, as well. As has been stated above, torrents are not a secure way of sharing files that should be paid for. Granted one can use the argument that many can be trusted with it, it has already been shown that there are many who can not. Whether or not piracy is theft(it is), that is a lot of potential revenue that Squad is not collecting, and therefore not able to put towards improving to their servers.

There is nothing good about taking premium files without any proper compensation. People put true effort into putting KSP together, when they don't have to. They are sacrificing a big chunk of their lives to share their ideas and imagination with us, and they deserve the respect owed them for that. While I am not one to generalize torrents as being only for piracy as music and movie studios would have you believe, it isn't the right tool for distributing entire game content over.

For the time being, it would be better for most of us to accept that with each update we will just have to be patient and not have high expectations to get that update on the day of release. I got my copy of 0.17 within 24 hours of its release, and that is fine with me. For one, I had plenty of other things to keep me distracted, and another, the fact the forums went kaput as well kept me from getting any spoilers about the update. I would actually suggest to the fine people who maintain the KSP forum servers take the opportunity to go ahead and do maintenance on them whenever a new update is released. It will save on the stress of dealing with all the 'OMG where is update OMG' posts, and those who end up eating their own face through their impatience might actually find something else to do with their time.

[TheUnknownPoet]

Better yet, could I somehow become a mirror? I'm affiliated with a hosting company who'd love to do this.

[technicalfool]

Bumping this because I really do think that BT (or some form of p2p data transfer) could solve some bandwidth issues. As already stated here, there are already unofficial torrents of KSP out there.. but you don't have to go and use the Pirate Bay as your tracker: You can run your own, and only people with KSP store logins (and a purchase on their accounts) can get access to it. Whether Squad run their own official tracker is going to have little to no effect on the amount of unofficial seeds out there. They could still offer the direct download for people who don't want to, or can't torrent their copy of KSP.

The other advantage of getting KSP from an official source is it is at least plausibly "safe", compared to the very real risk of your computer catching Machine AIDS from running unknown programs from unknown people who have no debt or responsibility to you as a customer and quite possibly very few scruples as far as building themselves a botnet is concerned. Hell, KSP itself could run a BT or similar node as its own updates mechanism, I guess so long as people can switch it off or define a maximum share ratio.

So come on, Squad devs. You're already a league above the rest for distributing your software without included crapware. There must be a way of using peer to peer technology to save your servers some strain, and show the rest of the games industry How To Do It.