- A frozen screen and DDoS attacks on the game pose a big threat for the gaming industry.
- Securing the software, hardware, and Internet connection may come across as a solution.
A frozen screen is a problem that many of us have faced when it comes to gaming. No matter, what platform you use to play games, but, the frozen screen is a persistent issue. For high-end games that have powerful graphics, the hardware configuration is also required to match up with the games.
For instance, you are playing a multi-player game with your friend and you are in the middle of destroying zombies in a game. At the same moment, the game screen is frozen.
The technical issues:
In this case, you not only compete with other players, but you are also battling latency issues and non-continuous Internet connectivity. This shows that, as far as gaming is concerned, the changes come in within milliseconds. These issues have become persistent and it has become difficult to provide a game field that matches the level of the gamers. Such issues can pose a big threat to latency and gaming experience for gamers.
Apart from the problems related to network issues, games that offer financial and monetary rewards have also gained traction in the market. With such games, the episodes of cheating have also shot up which poses a threat to game organizers. For instance, Dota 2 held a competition of an $18 million prize pool along with 200 million concurrent streams. The organizers had to stop the game when one of the teams built a botnet that started attacking other opponents.
To this date, the organizers have been struggling with an increasing number of attacks on the integrity of their competitions. They spend hundreds and thousands of dollars to provide very powerful hardware and software to make the games un-hackable. But it has been difficult to find the solution to such problems. Hence, Distributed Denial of Service attacks, (DDoS), continue to fail the developers.
It may sound challenging, but the latest technology can be used to solve latency and intermittency problems along with security vulnerability. The game developers can address this issue without reinvention of the entire wheel.
Ways to address the challenge:
To address this, the first thing you should see is, that cloud-based games heavily rely on various connections that have been enabled by the internet backbone. When you shoot a bullet from your gun, in a shooting sequence, the signal travels from your gaming machine to various nodes from your ISP. It goes from node to node across the Internet, travels thousands of miles of the physical wires. This way it reaches the servers of the game. Once it comes back to you, you see a change on the screen of your game.
In a gaming event, millions of transmissions happen between the gamers and the games every minute. And each connection poses a potential weak link. The basic problem lies where the public internet connectivity is not optimized to create the fast and secured connections that the games require.
Finding a Solution:
An efficient solution may come out of using secure hardware, software, and internet connectivity at an infrastructure level. To prevent the attacks, the game developers can use new technology to employ a Discord robot to configure a game server. It automatically provides encryption to all the connections established within a network with a high-performance tunneling mechanism.
It would look like each user has access to VPN, without any manual configuration and slow performance. When there is no encryption, when an attacker can get access to a single machine, he can quickly gain access to other machines. When universal encryption is applied, the attacks are made less effective even if they are coming from within the network of the gamers that are connected to the server. The reason behind this is that the single compromised connection would not allow interception within the transmission from other endpoints.
Fixing the problems during multiplayer gaming:
The organizers can also monitor the services within each end-point which can identify and determine the malicious entities in the real-time environment. This way, a lot of defense can be provided against various kinds of cheating. No one is doing this yet since it is a challenging task to handle.
Moreover, when it comes to gaming, the difference in the milliseconds decides the victory or defeat in the game. Thus, it is critical to solving the latency and problematic connections. One solution that we can apply without reinventing the entire internet infrastructure is to have an enhanced routing protocol layer. This provides an option to the internet’s default Border Gateway Protocol.
Instead of routing based on the number of hops, a smart routing protocol can identify the fastest and efficient route in a real-time environment. If the route thus planned, is congested, you can use a dynamic router to automatically re-routing the traffic. This ensures a consistent and equitable experience for all the players playing the same game.
