Multiplayer and trolling

[starcaptain]

We all have high hopes for the multiplayer features of KSP2 but it occurred to me: not everyone likes to play nice. 

Seeing as we have little to go on for how multiplayer works, it's hard to imagine what kinds of griefing or abuses may appear. But i raise this as a topic of concern,  because the online culture of a multiplayer video game is greater than the sum of the many different parts that make it up: 

*General player attitudes within the game

*Groups, cliques and common play styles

*Attitudes of the developers towards the online culture

*Tools made by the developers for ensuring safe, uncorrupted play

These and other things will have great impact on how and when trolling might occur,  and how amusing/annoying/destructive/toxic it may be. 

I want KSP2 to succeed, and the main thing i can do in that dimension is wanting to be a supportive,  friendly, and polite player. But I don't know how core these sorts of thoughts are for the developers. 

Edited July 26, 2021 by starcaptain

[Caerfinon]

6 minutes ago, starcaptain said:

We all have high hopes for the multiplayer

Personally, I'd rather play KSP2 in solo mode at all times. It's a relaxing form of "tinkering" for me. If I want multiplayer, there are other games that can provide that outlet.

[K^2]

I highly doubt that majority multiplayer will be anything other than inviting other players into your save game, effectively. Think Multiplayer in something like Terraria. So long as you can trust people you invite, it shouldn't be a problem. But hey, maybe have a backup of that saved game just in case.

Now, hopefully, dedicated servers will be a thing at some point, and people will be able to host community servers. That stuff will take moderation. If you make it open, people will grief. If you don't ban people for grieffing, it will get out of control. But it's not really a new problem. Minecraft servers are kind of in that category, and so long as there are good community moderation tools or if you are a bit more selective about people you invite it should be fine.

[Dientus]

18 minutes ago, K^2 said:

Now, hopefully, dedicated servers will be a thing at some point, and people will be able to host community servers. That stuff will take moderation. If you make it open, people will grief. If you don't ban people for grieffing, it will get out of control. But it's not really a new problem. Minecraft servers are kind of in that category, and so long as there are good community moderation tools or if you are a bit more selective about people you invite it should be fine.

Do we have a better understanding of multiplayer than what's listed in the multiplayer thread?

 

 

I only ask because the type of multiplayer it will be will most definitely figure in heavily as to whether or not being on the lookout for griefers will be an issue.

 

[pandaman]

I can't realistically see the game being able to cope with more than a few players (single figures) at once.  I could be wrong, but I really don't see KSP as suitable for MMO style play.

[starcaptain]

I am imagining KSP2 will have multiplayer up like, maybe 8, much in the same sort of manner as Terraria, like K^2 said. 

Colliding vessels while in space is one of those things that's destructive but also takes effort, like making a coordinated demolition in Garry's Mod. So i don't think that's a route of problems.

And the editors aren't multi in of themselves,  so players can't ruin each other's building task...

[K^2]

2 hours ago, Dientus said:

Do we have a better understanding of multiplayer than what's listed in the multiplayer thread?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think there's anything concrete in that thread.

Here's what I know. Intercept's LinkedIn page lists fewer than 30 people. Of them 10 have engineering roles, including one manager and one build engineer. There is no infrastructure, as far as I can tell, and only one engineer working specifically on multiplayer. Now not everybody is going to have a public LinkedIn profile, so we might not be seeing everyone, but this is a good starting point.

Another point of information is that this is a Unity game.  There are two general ways to build a real time multiplayer game in Unity. 1) You build it a lot like single-player game using Unity's native capabilities, making sure you specify what game state needs to be synchronized across network. If desired, this can be built as a stand-alone headless server for dedicated server deployment. 2) You write core game systems from scratch in whatever makes you happy. You then run the core either as a stand-alone server or as part of the game client, piping relevant information to game objects. Unity itself acts as basically a 3D animation player to render what's happening in the core.

Option 2 is scalable and theoretically lets you stand up as many instances on your server farm as needed to support large number of players. It also requires a lot more engineering support. It only really makes sense if you're building your own infrastructure and focusing heavily on multiplayer. We don't see any of that at Intercept. This isn't something you can hide. So it is Option 1.

With that first option, you are limited to two possibilities for core loop. You can have one of the players host a game and have other players join a game running on host's PC or console. Or you can run a dedicated server and have everyone join. Because it is a Unity server, don't expect miracles. It won't scale any better than running the game on your own PC. Which means the player cap is going to have to be pretty restrictive. They might not have a strict limit for number of people joining, but things will digress rapidly as more than a few players join.

There are games out there that takes sort of a hybrid approach, where core game loop works via very limited co-op or PVP with just 2-4 concurrent players, but there's a larger metagame that's much more social. Unfortunately, even if someone was to come up with what that looks like for KSP2, even that would require more people working on infrastructure and networking, and we'd see evidence of it on LinkedIn in some way. So it doesn't sound like Intercept is even going to run their own servers. There might be something light for registration and user authentication and they might end up partnering with some cloud hosting service that will make purchasing server instances easy, but my guess is that if you'll want a dedicated server, it will be up to community or individual players to organize.

So just based on the tech, that's really all that's left. Either you run your own game and invite a few people to join you across the network or you run a persistent dedicated server somewhere that allows several people to play on it concurrently. Think Minecraft multiplayer as a good example of what that might look like - you can have a lot of registered accounts, but not so many people playing at the same time before it starts struggling.

There is still a lot you can do in terms of game design with that, but you have to stay within these technical limitations. Large multiplayer worlds just aren't going to be possible with what they have to work with.

[intelliCom]

6 hours ago, starcaptain said:

We all have high hopes for the multiplayer features of KSP2 but it occurred to me: not everyone likes to play nice. 

Seeing as we have little to go on for how multiplayer works, it's hard to imagine what kinds of griefing or abuses may appear. But i raise this as a topic of concern,  because the online culture of a multiplayer video game is greater than the sum of the many different parts that make it up: 

*General player attitudes within the game

*Groups, cliques and common play styles

*Attitudes of the developers towards the online culture

*Tools made by the developers for ensuring safe, uncorrupted play

These and other things will have great impact on how and when trolling might occur,  and how amusing/annoying/destructive/toxic it may be. 

I want KSP2 to succeed, and the main thing i can do in that dimension is wanting to be a supportive,  friendly, and polite player. But I don't know how core these sorts of thoughts are for the developers. 

I thought it was 8-player multiplayer, in which case it would almost exclusively be between friends. Griefing is usually only a problem in cases between strangers in much larger games, such as Minecraft.

[Dientus]

3 hours ago, K^2 said:

 

Another point of information is that this is a Unity game.  There are two general ways to build a real time multiplayer game in Unity. 1) You build it a lot like single-player game using Unity's native capabilities, making sure you specify what game state needs to be synchronized across network. If desired, this can be built as a stand-alone headless server for dedicated server deployment. 2) You write core game systems from scratch in whatever makes you happy. You then run the core either as a stand-alone server or as part of the game client, piping relevant information to game objects. Unity itself acts as basically a 3D animation player to render what's happening in the core.

This I didn't realize. It makes @intelliCom  statement of 8 very likely at release.

 

3 hours ago, K^2 said:

We don't see any of that at Intercept. This isn't something you can hide. So it is Option 1.

Good assumption. I am admittedly very bad at seeing what Intercept is doing and staff they have hired. As such I didn't realize that my own assumption of 32 players is a lot less likely to come to pass by release.

 

3 hours ago, K^2 said:

. Think Minecraft multiplayer as a good example of what that might look like - you can have a lot of registered accounts, but not so many people playing at the same time before it starts struggling.

This is a logical conclusion. Everything clicks in my head now I believe... seeing what they are working with, not realizing Unity limitations, coupled with all the dev diaries, I think the whole picture finally sunk in. They are not really being hush hush about MP, they simply have nothing of substance to show since it is currently a one man show. 

 

One of my shortcomings as far as KSP2 assumptions go, is my IRL time. Reading forums and such on mobile in 10-15 minute chunks can leave a lot to be desired.  Thanks for clarifying things.

 

[mcwaffles2003]

Let the griefers be griefers. Let admins ban people. Don't build things you care about in public servers and just play around with the people around you when you are in them. This is the way.

I have a feeling multiplayer won't be anything like what I feel most are expecting with long thought out campaigns, drama, intrigue and massive systems... I expect a bunch of people building on-the-fly rockets trying to crash into each other and never really leaving kerbin because whats the point of playing multiplayer if you're just going to go off on your own and effectively play single player. Maybe if were lucky someone will start some racing servers where people have built tracks to race carts we build in the game or something along those lines.

That said, I think there will be some servers (probably private or pw protected) that do have long organized campaigns and I can't wait to see how far people go in that direction..

Personally, I'm most excited to see what comes out of a sandbox multiplayer with incredibly accurate and smooth running physics simulations with effectively infinite part choices after mods really get going. I'm really hoping to see new games or even new games genres to develop from modded multiplayer.

CS 1.6 effectively made overwatch-esque mechanics with warcraft 3 key binding modded servers and MOBA games like DOTA and LoL tie directly back to Warcraft 3 modded servers picking the already in game hero characters. Not to mention, maybe I'm wrong but I don't remember seeing it prior, WC3 also made the tower defense genre.

I think KSP 2 has potential beyond what any of us are currently imagining if the game is implemented right.

[Black Dog]

Best strategy against griefers would to build your outpost on a remote asteroid circling the planet closest to the star of a neighboring system. 

It would force those parasites to actually learn how to play the game.

[Dientus]

1 hour ago, Black Dog said:

Best strategy against griefers would to build your outpost on a remote asteroid circling the planet closest to the star of a neighboring system. 

It would force those parasites to actually learn how to play the game.

Good point. Although the way I see the game so far leads me to not worry to much about the possibility of trolls in the games I play, however

1 hour ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

I think KSP 2 has potential beyond what any of us are currently imagining if the game is implemented right.

This. Especially since we have yet to hear solid multiplayer information, and you add to that the fact of some really great community members and modders that reside here, I would wager that even the devs will be surprised a year after release.

 

[BuranAce]

Anyone trying to troll? slap some missiles on your rocket For all mankind style!

But in all seriousness, there should be some sort of report system where if a certain user is reported x amount of times they get banned from the server

 

[Pthigrivi]

4 hours ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

I have a feeling multiplayer won't be anything like what I feel most are expecting with long thought out campaigns, drama, intrigue and massive systems... I expect a bunch of people building on-the-fly rockets trying to crash into each other and never really leaving kerbin because whats the point of playing multiplayer if you're just going to go off on your own and effectively play single player. Maybe if were lucky someone will start some racing servers where people have built tracks to race carts we build in the game or something along those lines.

I think there definitely will be folks who race rovers and fly together, but what seems like the real enduring fun could be collaborative base and station building--basically co-op career. It looks like there will be a lot of infrastructure to set up before you go interstellar and it could be a lot of fun to work with friends building bases and mining outposts and supply routes throughout the system and beyond. This presents its own challenges in terms of shared or traded resources, but maybe each base or station has an owner who can enable permissions for other players to dock and draw or deposit fuels, ores, use the VAB or BAE, etc. By default you could still do space-race sims, but I think it only really becomes interesting when you're interacting with other players creations, and that really lends itself to small-scale servers of 2-8 players who know and trust each other. 
 

Edited July 27, 2021 by Pthigrivi

[Davi SDF]

We dont know pratically anything about KSP2 multiplayer... But the idea of a KSP Anarchy server is frightening and awesome

[MKI]

Player hosted small scale multiplayer is my bet, and I think it would work with the kind of gameplay KSP should focus on supporting both in single and multiplayer. Namely KSP should be a hard PVE game, where E is literally the environment of orbital mechanics. In that sense, KSP multiplayer should be more COOP rather than some massive multiplayer game. 

 

[starcaptain]

23 hours ago, K^2 said:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think there's anything concrete in that thread.

Here's what I know...

Do you think that Unity could support hot-swapping the host?

Picture this:  you and x friends keep a server continuously online by always having overlapping sessions at some point.

[Klapaucius]

I can see multiplayer being a great way to do KSP challenges or things like @Triop's rallies.  It would be fun to organize that type of thing via this forum.

I also agree with @Pthigrivi.  Creating a combined save where various folks set up supply chains and bases would be really interesting.  In fact, I think that would be the most likely scenario. I live in New Zealand, so I am not generally going to be online when someone in, for example: Toronto, Sao Paulo, Capetown or Mumbai is playing. So our cooperation will very much be staggered.  @Pthigrivistarts a base, someone else adds to it later in the day and then perhaps I swap out the crew later on or resupply it.

This sounds like fun. I am glad to hear from those who know more about these things than I do that an MMP is unlikely. I have no interest in a KSP EVE Online.  While I don't personally know anyone on the forum, I've seen enough of how folks post and what interests them to have an idea about who I would be keen to play with. 

 It only takes a small percentage of players to make it not worth it. Keep the groups small and it will be great.

Edited July 28, 2021 by Klapaucius

[Delta dart]

I always imagined that multiplayer would work similar to Minecraft multiplayer with servers run by the community with their own sets of rules (like servers dedicated to air to air combat or creating a massive space station) and the moderators of the individual servers could ban people as they see fit. There could also be LAN multiplayer.