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[Faceless]

This topic is primarily here just to serve my curiosity.

As we all know, the average indie developer earns about enough to survive and that's it. This means the luxuries of dedicated CDN server(s) aren't typically a reality. P2P/BitTorrent provides a cost-effective way of providing a similar service by distributing the data over a number of users. It's not a perfect solution because content can easily "disappear" if nobody shares it anymore.

But my my question is, would you mind such a feature in the game if allowed for an easy and effective way of sharing user created content? Would it be a major factor in turning you off the game entirely?

As a side question: what are you opinions on rewarding players who share a lot (ie. they seed a lot of what they download) with extra stuff? Maybe extra cosmetic items or something of that nature...

Good day.

[Christian Knudsen]

For security reasons, I'd prefer to download user created content from the developer's website.

[Faceless]

Well of course there would be some measure of security to downloading these things. It's not like the game client would blindly download any files fed to by the network, so it would never write data to any file type except (for example) .lvl with the explict mime-type of being plain-text.

Secondly, the game-client would verify the file is in the correct format, if it's not the file would be erased, the content might also be flagged or something to that effect.

Thirdly, we're talking about a theoretical situation where the user created content can't be stored on the developer's website because the storage/bandwidth costs are too high for example.

This is on top of some of the existing security measures of BitTorrent that mitigate injecting bad data into the swarm (CRC of pieces for example).

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For ethical reasons, if I were to implement this, I would make it very clear what the system is doing and present the user with the option to disable the system entirely as well as adjust upload data allowance limits.

There are some other issues associated with the system though, for example if a disproportionately high number of users are only consuming and never sharing, the system's effectiveness is reduced significantly and it's possible a lot of content could simply vanish from the swarm altogether.

This system could introduce some interesting ideas taken from private BitTorrent trackers, using upload "credit". You earn upload credit by creating an sharing content (upload credit is rewarded by people downloading the content you create) or sharing content you've downloaded with others (seeding back). This credit could then be used to "purchase" extra content like cosmetic items, assets for creating content and such.

Anyone who doesn't seed content wouldn't have access to this additional content naturally, but this isn't a total loss; undoubtedly some will want to have access to this content without having to seed content so it could be capitalised on by providing the option to purchase upload credit (much like the system private BitTorrent trackers have in place).

I think it's quite an elegant solution. It's great for the developer as it saves money on expensive CDNs, it rewards the user for contributing to the continued existence of the swarm, and it can be capitalised on to support the developer with extra money where people don't want to give back to the swarm.

[JMickle]

it seems pretty smart, i see no problem with the idea.

[nico]

Depends really on how you are using it. Using bittorrent as a behind-the-scenes protocol? Sure, no problem. Bittorrent is a superior and very under-utilized technology. As long as you keep the users informed and let them keep control of what's going on, and don't basically take over their computer and bandwidth without asking, then I think it's a great idea.

I'm guessing you're not talking about forcing users to manually use external bittorrent clients and servers etc, that would be user-friendlyness suicide.

There are several services that can help you actually. Amazon's S3 hosting for example lets you just append ?torrent to any public url and instantly get a torrent file that's tracked and seeded by amazon. But then you'll have to pay for the part that's downloaded from their seed, though, so that's probably only worth it for large and in-demand downloads.

[Nix]

It's very important that you be able to turn it off. Lots of public internet connections will detect any sort of torrent-like behavior and remove you from the network.

[Theophilus]

Isn't there also that new bill in US congress that denies users an internet connection or something if they torrent? I'd like an option to turn it off should that ever pass...