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Garena removing LAN

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Level 31
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:ogre_datass::ogre_datass::ogre_icwydt: any1 hear about this? garena removed lan from a bunch of countries, but apparently some countries can still use it.

with the new update today, it seems confirmed as the LAN button is completely removed

what do u guys think ?? ? ? :goblin_jawdrop::goblin_jawdrop::goblin_jawdrop::goblin_jawdrop:

and does anyone know any :ogre_rage:alternatives to garena that work similarly:vw_death::ogre_frown:

heres the only thread on it i could find http://dotautilities-forums.net/Thread-Garena-Lan-Removed
 
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What the heck does ggc do anyway apart from letting you play in a simulated LAN?
Please someone clear those questions..
 
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Go download GameRanger. A lot of the peeps there host much better maps, than what most Garena users host (Modified Dota, Dota, Vampirism, etc.)
 
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I still dont get what the ggc admins did. For what can it be used now? Is this a plain suicide or whats behind this?
 

Dr Super Good

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Just log in to BattleNet. Despite the game being 10 years old Blizzard still is running it. In fact why even use a virtual LAN in the first place, especially since it is slower as the tunnelling adds extra overhead.

Ethernet frames inside other frames, extra overhead of another frame header.
Ethernet frames inside other frames, extra processor time overhead from extraction/generation.

I recon approximately a 20-30% overhead, as there will be at least another full frame copy.

Sure it is mostly trivial, but totally unnecessary when you can just log in to BattleNet and use IPv4 directly to play multiplayer sessions. Well I guess if you only have an IPv6 address it may be necessary but seriously, no one in the UK has one as BT refuses to enable it.
 
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Just log in to BattleNet. Despite the game being 10 years old Blizzard still is running it. In fact why even use a virtual LAN in the first place, especially since it is slower as the tunnelling adds extra overhead.

Ethernet frames inside other frames, extra overhead of another frame header.
Ethernet frames inside other frames, extra processor time overhead from extraction/generation.

I recon approximately a 20-30% overhead, as there will be at least another full frame copy.

Sure it is mostly trivial, but totally unnecessary when you can just log in to BattleNet and use IPv4 directly to play multiplayer sessions. Well I guess if you only have an IPv6 address it may be necessary but seriously, no one in the UK has one as BT refuses to enable it.

The quality of the original bnet has decreased over the last years. When i started playing broodwar battlenet was much faster and not as crowded with spambots and hackers. Blizzard gives a shit about bnet since they released bnet2. Good alternatives are iccup and w3arena (wc3 is not that popular on iccup though).
 

Rui

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The quality of the original bnet has decreased over the last years. When i started playing broodwar battlenet was much faster and not as crowded with spambots and hackers. Blizzard gives a shit about bnet since they released bnet2. Good alternatives are iccup and w3arena (wc3 is not that popular on iccup though).
I'll have to agree. I don't know if it's due to bots leeching, but wc3 melee has like 2 seconds delay, as if the engine's pathing wasn't already hard to deal with.

Ethernet frames inside other frames, extra overhead of another frame header.
Ethernet frames inside other frames, extra processor time overhead from extraction/generation.
That sounds interesting. How do you know how this is done? Does it have to do with the concept of virtual LAN?
 
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in my country, most of people will go to a cyber cafe to play games. i'm just guessing that they don't own computer or laptop. and in each cyber cafe, the owner usually just download those games instead of buying it. that's why they can't get full access to a game like wc3.
 

Dr Super Good

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i'm just guessing that they don't own computer or laptop. and in each cyber cafe, the owner usually just download those games instead of buying it. that's why they can't get full access to a game like wc3.
Well it depends on the law and if your country recognizes intellectual property and copyright. Under European and United States of America laws it is illegal and the owner could be fined/sued several million in damages.
 
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Well, wow. Every time one of you guys posts something like that I become more and more depressed by how 3rd-world-country the Phillipines sounds like.
Then again, it's kinda the same with Greece. I suppose that most people have a PC, just no internet access, maybe?

@DSG - that depends on how much the country prosecutes those laws, more like it. In Israel, I think it's also illegal, but I just don't think the government gives a shit. Then again, I could be entirely wrong, but I've never heard of anyone being arrested for piracy in Israel.
...However, I do recall one case in which our village had a sort of "movie server", with loads and loads of pirated movies and films that anyone in the village could watch, and then one day it was just gone. My friends at the time told me that they were blocked for piracy, but I don't know if anyone was arrested or fined.
 

Dr Super Good

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It's laggier. Like, 2-second-delay laggier. At least the two times I played on B.net with a Swedish dude hosting(excellent internet, and we never had trouble on Garena).
Until someone posts proof of this I have to write it off as marketing scam. The fact is that BattleNet does not process game packets. All hosting is done peer to peer. The only difference between BattleNet hosting and LAN hosting is that a smaller unit for latency is used (BattleNet defaults to 150ms or something). However Host Robots can change this anyway.

Using a VPN service cannot possibly be faster than a direct peer to peer communication. How can embedding two IP frames in each other possibly be faster? At very best you have the overhead of processing the VPN IP frame on top of the exact same IPv4 communication frame that would be used in standard BattleNet hosting but now is being used for the VPN frames.

The only possible explanation I have is that your ISP must be deliberately providing a very poor quality of service to WC3 type communications. VPN packets are a different type of communication so may be receiving a better quality of service.

Playing with people in the US from the UK over BattleNet with standard hosting gave me at worst 400 ms if there was not congestion.

When I hosted people had mixed reports. About 70% said latency was good (100-200 ms, you cannot expect much better across an ocean...) while the rest reported slightly worse latency. One in particular reported the "2 second" delay you have and at the time I wrote it off as a combination of him having a huge network distance from me and my upload is pretty rubbish. It is possible there was more to it.

However I still will not except people just saying it is better. You need to explain why it is better in the terms of how it can produce better results than BattleNet hosting and why BattleNet hosting is giving you huge latency in the first place.
 
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Until someone posts proof of this I have to write it off as marketing scam.

I... What. Are you implying I'm trying to lie about this?
I bought WC3 because I felt that I've enjoyed it enough to support Blizzard Entertainment. Linaze wanted to play-test Scars of Conflict with me, so we went to Battle.net's Northrend server(it being the European one, and therefore supposedly the least laggy for a Swedish host and an Israeli player). When we got into the game, I was shocked by how unplayably laggy it was. I really did not expect something like that for Battle.net. So we went to Tunngle(which is thus far my favorite platform for virtual LAN), and all the lag was gone.

It could've just been an unlucky day, I dunno. Maybe my\his internet happened to be slightly shittier when we were trying to play. I could try again and check, though I don't know if it would help.

...Oh, and for the record, 400ms is horrendously unplayable. Anything above 170-200 is.

As for all of this... IP, VPN mumbo-jumbo, I have no clue. I must confess I have very little knowledge in the subject. I know only the basic theory, and even then, only barely. All I can give is the fact of the matter as it is. I can't explain it, it just is.
 
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Yeah same here. BNET is pretty bad these days. It is not a problem of the software though because iccup and w3arena are using bnet emulators and the latency is great. As i stated before Blizzard gives a shit about BNET1 these days. BNET1 still runs yes but the maintenance is horrible.
 

Dr Super Good

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(it being the European one, and therefore supposedly the least laggy for a Swedish host and an Israeli player).
Their servers have nothing to do with your peer to peer traffic. Their servers only send you social updates like friend messages and status.

I can host a game on the US West server (across the ocean and most of a continent) and my brother can still play with <1 ms ping. How? Peer to peer traffic and since he is on my LAN (not a VPN, a real physical LAN) communications to him do not even go through the internet and are instead sent straight to him after hitting the local router.

When we got into the game, I was shocked by how unplayably laggy it was. I really did not expect something like that for Battle.net. So we went to Tunngle(which is thus far my favorite platform for virtual LAN), and all the lag was gone.
Why was the lag gone? Seeing how both use IP packets through the internet. The VPN at best should be performing peer to peer communication which is what BattleNet hosting does anyway.

400ms is horrendously unplayable.
Well seeing how the guy was literally on the other side of the earth 6-8 years ago... It was a LoaP or something silly anyway so unplayable? no.

Anything above 170-200 is.
For a RTS game 170-200 is fine. You do not have to wait for confirmation before issuing another order you know. If you did your own visual processing response would dominate.

As for all of this... IP, VPN mumbo-jumbo, I have no clue. I must confess I have very little knowledge in the subject. I know only the basic theory, and even then, only barely. All I can give is the fact of the matter as it is. I can't explain it, it just is.
There is no such thing as magic.

Yeah same here. BNET is pretty bad these days. It is not a problem of the software though because iccup and w3arena are using bnet emulators and the latency is great. As i stated before Blizzard gives a shit about BNET1 these days. BNET1 still runs yes but the maintenance is horrible.
I have said it many times already and will keep saying it. When you host, you are the server. BattleNet has nothing to do with anyone hosting, it only acts as a listing server (custom game list) and for social. When a player joins a game from BattleNet, he is given the host's IP address and socket and then proceeds to connect directly with the host. This is why you cannot host behind a NAT unless you specifically declare a port mapping to the local IP address of the host machine as the NAT will discard the incoming packets as it has no idea where to route them. When in game the only communication relating to the game (not the social friends stuff) is between the players and the host via peer to peer. If there is bad latency that is because between you and the host there is a bad latency connection.

It should be noted that a unreliable connection (high packet loss) will appear as bad latency due to all the re-transmits taking 1 RTT each.
 
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Sorry but what are you talking about? Did you ever play broodwar on BNET and then play on iccup? The latency is different and therefore you can not micro your units as well.

For a RTS game 170-200 is fine. You do not have to wait for confirmation before issuing another order you know. If you did your own visual processing response would dominate.

No its not enough.
 

Dr Super Good

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Did you ever play broodwar on BNET and then play on iccup?
I do not own StarCraft 1.

The latency is different and therefore you can not micro your units as well.
If it is anything like WC3 this is because LAN defaults to a much smaller synchronization period. Since LANs are local they generally do not suffer >100ms delay due to having to cross large distances around Earth. BattleNet defaults to a much larger delay to cope with this delay.

The only reason LAN games are playable on a VPN WAN is that the BattleNet synchronization period was set for the Internet at the time (which was not as fast as it is now). A smaller synchronization period can be used however it will always have to be larger than a true LAN because a VPN does not alter the laws of physics (is not magic).

The delay in WC3 BattleNet was more than acceptable. If you honestly think it makes much of a difference then you will be pleased to know that robot hosted games have full control over this synchronization period (and why they get better results some times than even LAN hosted games since they can set it smaller).

Why not set the synchronization period to the smallest possible value? Well if you want the game to stall multiple times a second, go ahead. This is why Blizzard set BattleNet to such a large default value, because if it is too large all it does is add some delay but if it is too small the game does become unplayable.

No its not enough.
You will have to speak to Doctor Who then, since in real life we have yet to develop a Tardis, the machine required to make internet play between Europe and the United States of America have a latency less than 100ms.
 
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Maybe Garena has good servers that host the game for the host, then. I guess kind of like in StarCraft II. I'm not sure.

As for that MS argument... You have to micro in WC3, too. You have to pull your unit back when its health is low. You can't play with 200ms because you can't pull your unit back fast enough.
 
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I can confirm that garena hosts for the host. It doesn't require me any extra work to host on garena, while on b-net I simply can't host.

One other program has actually explained why ("Symmetric NAT router"). but so far I've not found a way to fix this. It might actually impossible in my current state of things, as I usually use portable hotspot(smartphone) or a 3G net stick for my internet.
 

Dr Super Good

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You can't play with 200ms because you can't pull your unit back fast enough.
Neither can WC3 micro that fast. It only calculates move orders one unit at a time per player per frame. Again I also emphasized this as a worst case (usually it was the 100-150 range).

I can confirm that garena hosts for the host. It doesn't require me any extra work to host on garena, while on b-net I simply can't host.
So the games magically appear? I am pretty sure you host. The reason people can join is because the VPN has its own IP address space which is not behind a NAT and as such the required traffic can resolve the target host.

One other program has actually explained why ("Symmetric NAT router").
I have no idea why this would prevent you from hosting. It only means that STUN servers cannot resolve a mapped port for you (which services like Steam use?).

The solution is you need to manually define a mapping for the port with your IP address.

The fact Garena works through such a NAT realizes my worst fears. As opposed to direct peer to peer connection you are actually connecting via proxy!

So let me explain why you seem to get less latency using the service. Your ISPs suck and create a very bad peer to peer connection (routing via congested nodes, sub-optimal paths or overall not very fast). By using Garena you are instead connecting to a network set up on one of their servers. This is located on a different part of the Internet from the direct peer to peer connection so might avoid the problematic routing. However if your ISP does not suck and routes stuff correctly (via high speed / less congested / more directly) Garena will actually be slower than a peer to peer connection.
as I usually use portable hotspot(smartphone) or a 3G net stick for my internet.
These services are not meant for gamming. The reliability and latency generally is too poor.
 

Dr Super Good

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Who is the host in Warcraft III melee games?
Probably BattleNet, does not mater in this context though (since you only play it for ranking which is clearly not something LAN supports) and will likely not suffer the latency problems described anyway.

You won't explain this to me? =(
Not much too explain. You can tunnel IP packets from one network inside IP packets of another network to deliver them somewhere. To this tunnelled network it would appear as a simple link hop for the packet when in reality it may have gone though any number of real internet hops. Primarily intended for use in large companies with physically separate premises with no physical links between them (no private WAN). Using this they can keep a consistent address structure across all systems as if they were on a single LAN. Could also be implemented by an Ethernet tunnel (you embed local Ethernet frames inside an IP packet with the only real difference being the use of Switching instead of Routing.

Garena apparently does their VPN by forwarding all your packets to a central server which acts as a router. This then routes them to the appropriate network node. NAT traversal is achieved by the mapping created when connecting to the central server (which acts as a return path).

You may even find that it embeds two (not 1) extra headers in the packet as well as performs indirect routing. I am guessing a TCP connection is made with the Garnea servers which they then shove the VPN IP packet through which in itself contains another TCP connection (the one WC3 is using). The result is you have a TCP header in a IP header in a TCP header in an IP header.

The only way this would ever produce better latency is if the peer to peer route has considerably more latency than both the one peer to the server and the server to the other peer routes combined. Basically Garena offers you different and indirect routing to communicate between peers. This should always be slower if your ISP is routing packets correctly.

No offense but did you ever play the game?
You clearly must have not much or you would be well aware of the problems with moving armies in WC3. Did you ever wonder why some units start moving before others in melee if you order 2 full groups to move almost at the same time? Try moving 100 units in a crowded situation (constant unit on unit collisions) and you will see that WC3 has considerable problems.

I agree that latency may be a problem early game where you control 3-4 units at a time and micro is key however late game when it is army on army there is no way the standard latency prevents you from moving units faster as the game engine itself is capping movement calculations.
 
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So did anyone actually contact Garena about this?

Probably, but Garena also probably did not respond. I don't really see the people of Garena being really helpful people.
If they're going to remove Garena from a couple of countries (Philippines), then they're going to have a bad time.
 
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I'm pretty sure if you look how long garena is not responding at all and just look at the past of garena not caring about the community you will see that garena has started dying long ago.

And i'm not sure if i'm the only one but why isn't there forum on garena website?I mean i could've sworn that forum existed before any of this problem appeared.
 
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