Multiplayer Games and their Need for Scalable and Secure State Management

TL;DR

This paper discusses the challenges of scalable and secure state management in peer-to-peer multiplayer online games, highlighting solutions to prevent cheating and ensure consistency in distributed environments.

Contribution

It reviews existing cheat-proof schemes and interest management techniques to enhance security and scalability in P2P MMOG architectures.

Findings

P2P architectures offer low-cost, scalable solutions for MMOGs.

Cheat-proof schemes utilize cryptography, commitment protocols, and proxy architectures.

Interest management is crucial for maintaining game state consistency.

Abstract

In recent years, massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) have become very popular by providing more entertainment, therefore millions of players now participate may interact with each other in a shared environment, even though these players may be separated by huge geographic distances. Peer to Peer (P2P) architectures become very popular in MMOG recently, due to their distributed and collaborative nature, have low infrastructure costs, achieve fast response times by creating direct connections between players and can achieve high scalability. However, P2P architectures face many challenges and tend to be vulnerable to cheating. Game distribution between peers makes maintaining control of the game becomes more complicated. Therefore, broadcasting all state changes to every player is not a viable solution to maintain a consistent game state in a MMOGs. To successfully overcome the challenge of scale, MMOGs have to employ sophisticated interest management techniques that only send relevant state changes to each player. In this paper, In order to prevent cheaters to gain unfair advantages in P2P-based MMOGs, several cheat-proof schemes have been proposed that utilize a range of techniques such as cryptographic mechanisms, Commitment and agreement protocols, and proxy architecture.