Design issues for Peer-to-Peer Massively Multiplayer Online Games

Abstract

Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) are increasing in both popularity and scale, and while classical Client/Server (C/S) architectures convey some benefits, they suffer from significant technical and commercial drawbacks. This realisation has sparked intensive research interest in adapting MMOGs to Peer-to-Peer (P2P) architectures. This paper articulates a comprehensive set of six design issues to be addressed by P2P MMOGs, namely Interest Management (IM), game event dissemination, Non-Player Character (NPC) host allocation, game state persistency, cheating mitigation and incentive mechanisms. Design alternatives for each issue are systematically compared, and their interrelationships discussed. We further evaluate how well representative P2P MMOG architectures fulfil the design criteria.

Simulation of Massively Multiplayer Online Games communication using OPNET custom application

“…The primary requirement for MMOGs based on Peer-toPeer architecture is to maintain state consistency, and a shared sense of virtual space among great numbers of players without the need for support by the server [9]. The development of a peer to peer architecture for a MMOG is a significant research topic.…”

“…Peer-to-peer architectures do not have central server and therefore it becomes most difficult to present single consistent virtual world to all users. In Peer-to-Peer system, distributing the game state over all the peers in the game world, so there will have to be an effective way to set different elements of the game world to different peers [9].…”

Distributing game instances in a hybrid client-server/P2P system to support MMORPG playability

“…With the goal of providing an unlimited scalability that is able to manage peak load situations dynamically, some authors propose the use of completely decentralized systems, such as Peer-toPeer networks. In this kind of system, apart from the load distribution techniques, there are additional aspects to be faced [15] that have been studied by several authors: (a) Establishing an effective mechanism for propagating events in a high latency network. Different alternatives have been presented that are applied in the network layer [5,8] or the application layer [9].…”

On synthetic workloads for multiplayer online games: a methodology for generating representative shooter game workloads

“…With these methods, any number of players can be employed to generate reproducible and scalable workload. First, results have been published in previous work [7].…”