Esports: A Network Focus
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There are many Esports games your school can play part in, but for this presentation, we’re going to focus on Overwatch a game SUNY Canton has built a formattable team for. We’re not going to look at the gamer’s PC requirements. That being an important piece to the gamer experience, we’ll leave that to our Alienware friends. So, let’s look at the What and Why’s of enhancing the Gamer experience for Overwatch from a Network Focus? There are five areas I would focus on; they are: Latency/Performance #1 Visibility Security Cloud/ISP Tools/Network-Management
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Esports: A Network Focus
- 1. ©2019 Extreme Networks, Inc. All rights reserved Esports: A Network Focus
- 2. ©2019 Extreme Networks, Inc. All rights reserved Esports: A Network Focus 2 ESPORTS Latency/ Performance #1 Visibility Security Cloud/ISP Tools/Network- Management
- 3. ©2019 Extreme Networks, Inc. All rights reserved Esports: A Network Focus Latency/Jitter 3 “Anything over 1 or 2 Mbps download speed is going to be sufficient for most online gaming. - What matters for online gamers is low latency. Latency (defined as the average time it takes a network packet to travel from you, to a server, and back) is that lag you can sometimes see online, be it in a web page download stuttering or game struggling to keep up.” IND (Interpolation Delay) is in some games Stat’s Display. IND is the small buffer of time between when your client gets information from the server, and when it's shown to you in the game. This is normally around 50-60ms for normal games. RTT (Round Trip Time) https://www.imperva.com/learn/performance/round-trip-time-rtt/ Round-trip time (RTT) is the duration, measured in milliseconds, from when a browser sends a request to when it receives a response from a server. It’s a key performance metric for web applications and one of the main factors, along with Time to First Byte (TTFB), when measuring page load time and network latency Protocols Online gaming uses TCP for non-critical traffic such as chat, game lobbies, etc. The Game traffic uses UDP.
- 4. ©2019 Extreme Networks, Inc. All rights reserved Esports: A Network Focus Visibility 4 If you can’t see it, you can’t manage it.
- 5. ©2019 Extreme Networks, Inc. All rights reserved Esports: A Network Focus Security 5
- 6. ©2019 Extreme Networks, Inc. All rights reserved Esports: A Network Focus Cloud/ISP 6 https://www.pcmag.com/news/365904/the-best-gaming-isps-of-2019 https://www.pcmag.com/article/350064/the-best-gaming-isps-of-2017 “According to the PCMag Gaming Quality index, anything over 1 or 2 Mbps download speed is going to be sufficient for most online gaming. The hard work of making a game look good and run smoothly is, after all, handled by the hard drives and graphics cards of your consoles or gaming PCs. What matters for online gamers is low latency. Latency (defined as the average time it takes a network packet to travel from you, to a server, and back) is that lag you can sometimes see online, be it in a web page download stuttering or game struggling to keep up. An ISP needs to provide consistent and stable connection to the internet servers used for online play between players. One thing you can't always count on year to year is the gaming quality of a connection. The latency on ISPs can be up one year and down another, sometimes with startlingly different numbers.”
- 7. ©2019 Extreme Networks, Inc. All rights reserved Esports: A Network Focus Cloud/ISP “A CDN is a network of strategically placed servers, each holding a copy of a website’s content. It’s able to address the factors influencing RTT in the following ways: • Points of Presence (PoPs) A CDN maintains a network of geographically dispersed PoPs—data centers, each containing cached copies of site content, which are responsible for communicating with site visitors in their vicinity. They reduce the distance a signal has to travel and the number of network hops needed to reach a server. • Web caching A CDN caches HTML, media, and even dynamically generated content on a PoP in a user’s geographical vicinity. In many cases, a user’s request can be addressed by a local PoP and does not need to travel to an origin server, thereby reducing RTT. • Load distribution During high traffic times, CDNs route requests through backup servers with lower network congestion, speeding up server response time and reducing RTT. • Scalability A CDN service operates in the cloud, enabling high scalability and the ability to process a near limitless number of user requests. This eliminates the possibility of server side bottlenecks. • Tier 1 access CDNs have agreements with the biggest Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to provide Tier 1 access to the internet backbone. This reduces the number of network hops a connection must travel through, greatly reducing a signal’s round trip time.” 7 https://www.imperva.com/learn/performance/round-trip-time-rtt/ https://www.keycdn.com/blog/cdn-for-gaming
- 8. ©2019 Extreme Networks, Inc. All rights reserved Esports: A Network Focus Tools/Network-Management 8 Extreme Management Center, Campus Fabric, Service and Support – Ranked #1 A single place for Granular Visibility and Management of the Wired and Wireless Edge to Data Center and Cloud
- 9. ©2019 Extreme Networks, Inc. All rights reserved Esports: A Network Focus Elements 9
- 10. ©2019 Extreme Networks, Inc. All rights reserved Esports: A Network Focus Elements 10 A Happy Esports Player/Student
- 11. ©2019 Extreme Networks, Inc. All rights reserved WWW.EXTREMENETWORKS.COM
Editor's Notes
- Hello, My name is Robert Kwiatkowski; I’m a Senior Systems Engineer for Extreme Networks supporting many Education customers in Upstate NY. I have had the privilege of working with SUNY Canton and their Esports Team, the Roos, to create the best possible Gamer Experience from a Network focus. I’d like to share with you today some important elements you should be thinking about when designing the Ideal Esports Network. If done right, you can enhance the Gamer’s Experience. There are many Esports games your school can play part in, but for this presentation, we’re going to focus on Overwatch a game SUNY Canton has built a formattable team for. We’re not going to look at the gamer’s PC requirements. That being an important piece to the gamer experience, we’ll leave that to our Alienware friends. So, let’s look at the What and Why’s of enhancing the Gamer experience for Overwatch from a Network Focus? There are five areas I would focus on; they are: Latency/Performance #1 Visibility Security Cloud/ISP Tools/Network-Management
- Let’s go right to what really matters to gamers from a network perspective. It’s all about Latency and Latency consistency. Gamers are very aware of Latency. IND or Interpolation Delay is when you combine the network latency with the PC latency. IND (Interpolation Delay) IND is the small buffer of time between when your client gets information from the server, and when it's shown to you in the game. This is normally around 50-60ms for normal games.
- https://www.highschoolesportsleague.com/ow-rules 8.4. Stoppage of Play Why is Visibility so important? Well, let’s look at this from a performance and a rules perspective. We know latency is extremely important, but what happens when it’s not or let’s say a player or more has an issues connecting to the service? What happens to the team? 8.5. Player Count Both teams participating in a match must provide 6 players at the beginning of the first game, and 5 for each consecutive game. During a game, if a team should lose 2 players that have disconnected with the intention of no longer playing in the match at the same time, that team will forfeit the remainder of the game to the opposing team. If a team is not able to field the required amount of players for additional games in the series, then they will forfeit the remainder of the match. Stoppage of play may be requested at any time for the above reasons. The match host (person who created the match lobby and therefore has pausing privileges) must initiate a pause when a team requests it so long as the pause is not called during combat, while the objective is contested, or during overtime. Each team will have 5 total minutes of pause time per map. Players pause the game using the key combination Ctrl + Shift + =. Abuse of the auto-pause feature may result in punishment for the team abusing it. The game may only be paused for the following reasons: Player drop Player disconnect Server crash Technical issues
- What are the gamers using to help them figure out where the issue might be when the gaming experience is not optimal? They’re using tools that you may not want allow on the network for security concerns. These tools are simple free software that allows you to trace the route between your location and a specific IP address, locating and pining all the hops in between. The software is also known as an IP scanner that scans your IP address and delivers complete information about your networks. Some show where exactly the packet loss is happening in the route to the destination host in real-time. MTR (My Traceroute) mtr uses ICMP Time Exceeded (type 11) packets returning from routers, or ICMP Echo Reply packets when the packets have hit their destination host. ... The real advantage of mtr over ping or traceroute is, it shows where exactly the packet loss is happening in the route to the destination host in realtime. IND (Interpolation Delay)) IND is the small buffer of time between when your client gets information from the server, and when it's shown to you in the game. This is normally around 50-60ms for normal games. DDoS Protection# There are a few ways to help protect yourself against DDoS attacks. Keep an eye on the inbound traffic hitting your server and monitor everything for irregularities. The sooner you see an unusual spike in traffic that looks suspicious, the sooner you can start investigating. Implement rate limiting in the event you are being attacked in order to avoid your server being overwhelmed. Add filters to your router to drop packets from suspicious sources. In Overwatch's Asia servers, there were problems with numerous players using hacks tied to the growing number of younger players using PC bangs in South Korea that allow them to play Overwatch on an inexpensive hourly rate rather than purchasing the game. As these players do not need permanent accounts, they can use disposable Battle.net accounts and employ game hacks without repercussion, as if that account is banned, they can quickly make another and continue playing. Blizzard continues to block these accounts at a rate of thousands per day, but have not been able to find a more permanent solution.[261] Subsequently, Blizzard announced that players from South Korea will be required to log into a Battle.net account to play the game from February 2017 onward, which requires unique identification include an difficult-to-spoof resident registration number, which Blizzard believes will help to alleviate the problem.[262] https://na.alienwarearena.com/ucf/show/1736966/boards/we-love-games/ForumPost/overwatch-video-game A PC bang is a type of LAN gaming center in South Korea, where patrons can play multiplayer computer games for an hourly fee.
- Use new sports car analogy: speed, luxury package, all the features; now it needs to go on a road that’s most suitable for it. It needs the best route possible between its location and destination with no congestion, no stop or yield signs or red lights, no pot holes, etc.. Reference Blizzard forum conversation: “Changing isp being bad advice? In what world? In real life genius. This is the same stuff Blizzard told me as a last resort solution. That's their advice and I forward it to you. The the car is perfectly fine and you need to pick a different road that isn't bumpy or congested.” Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. is an American video game developer and publisher based in Irvine, California, and is a subsidiary of Activision Blizzard. The company was founded on February 8, 1991, under the name Silicon & Synapse, Inc. by three graduates of the University of California, Los Angeles:[2] Michael Morhaime, Frank Pearce and Allen Adham. Currently, Blizzard has four main franchises: Warcraft, Diablo, StarCraft, and Overwatch. Battle.net 2.0 Main article: Battle.net Blizzard released its revamped Battle.net service in 2009. This service allows people who have purchased Blizzard products (StarCraft, StarCraft II, Diablo II, and Warcraft III, as well as their expansions) to download digital copies of games they have purchased, without needing any physical media. On November 11, 2009, Blizzard required all World of Warcraft accounts to switch over to Battle.net accounts. This transition means that all current Blizzard titles can be accessed, downloaded, and played with a singular Battle.net login.[42] Battle.net 2.0 is the platform for matchmaking service for Blizzard games, which offers players a host of additional features. Players are able to track their friend's achievements, view match history, avatars, etc. Players are able to unlock a wide range of achievements (rewards for completing game content) for Blizzard games. The service allows players to chat simultaneously with players from other Blizzard games. For example, players no longer need to create multiple user names or accounts for most Blizzard products. To enable cross game communication, players need to become either Battletag or Real ID friends.[citation needed]
- Let’s review 5 key benefits of a CDN. I may add some content here around NYSERNet as they apparently have CDN connectivity – peering with Blizzard and others. The Importance of Using a CDN for Gaming By Cody Arsenault Updated on February 5, 2018
- The player has in game stats to monitor their individual network experience, but some players are also using many other tools to monitor or troubleshoot network performance. As we showed you earlier, some of these tools in the wrong hands can exploit the network for malicious attacks. The ideal monitoring solution should give the network administrator a full 360-degree view to first be proactive rather than reactive and have the ability to know exactly where the problem lies. This should be a single place of Visibility, not bouncing from Application to Application. A good place start with Extreme Networks for your Esports solution would be Extreme Management Center/XMC. XMC provides a single place for Granular Visibility and Management of the Wired and Wireless Edge to Data Center and Cloud; it’s backed by a Gartner Ranked #1 Service and Support. PCMag Speed Test http://pcm-intl.speedtestcustom.com/
- To compete effectively, it is important that the school gaming center be equipped with the best possible wired and wireless network. Even a five-millisecond connectivity delay can significantly impact the outcome of the game. It’s critical to monitor the bandwidth and latency of the network to make sure the fast reflexes of competitors translate to in-game advantage. It’s also important to identify the gaming devices and traffic to be optimized for the best possible performance while ensuring everything is secure. Please join us in Syracuse NY on October 3rd to find out what Elements are used to create the ideal Network Infrastructure to support and maintain the Best possible Gaming Experience. We’ll be showing How – the blueprint of an Ideal Esports Network Design.
- I’d like to leave you with this, if you focus on the Esports player, the Human Element and what’s important to them, you will be competitive. They are the What and Why we deliver Customer Driven Network Solutions. Thank you!