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"friendcode" seems to be pretty standard in multiplayer video games


Maybe "contactcode" would be better in this situation, as it doesn't imply any specific relationship between participants.


HellDivers 2 LFG rn is all about sharing Friendcodes... you can get a ton of them on discord or reddit... but then you end up haveing a "friendcode" cybermentally-distributed DNS system for them over time.

Six degrees will still exist.

(funny weird thing is that with HD2's server issues due too demand, one way to harvest this would be to create a fake LFG host game and have tons and tons of accounts bang against your HellDiver-Pot - and get whatever you can scrape from that?

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OK - I actually went down this hole the other daty... you look at the reddit thread on helldrivers for LFG - or the discord...

So on reddit, you just put .json at end of thread - DL the entire thread as json, now you have reddit id, location, play style, etc, details AND their friendcode on HD2... but since they can individually generate random friend codes on any game/system that allows such... you have a breadcrump (with enough attention span to just correlate all the shared info between these friend codes and data received...

still - even with random friend codes - six degrees is still available, easily.??

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I deeply hope they do a Tech Talk on the post-mortem of this lauch success spiral - its fascinating....

But one thing I am really interested in, this is based on the Autodesk Engine, I know they co-dev-dog-fooded, but I hadnt really known of this engine at all... what little I do know, is that - its amazing...

But I'd really like to know more about the arch and overall traffic flows etc of this game.

Its beautiful see "problems" like this explode in like ~2 weeks.

What do internet traffic graphs look like since growth, per carrier?


Does it not have built-in public matchmaking?


The developers last game had an all time peak of 7,000 users. They planned worst case scenario of 250,000 users for the sequel expecting more realistically 50,000 users.

They're currently at 394,686 players on steam alone - not including Playstation players. The servers are doing their best right now.


Sorry, I don't quite understand this in the context of "friend code" vs "matchmaking". Are you saying that friend codes bypass their servers, allowing peer-to-peer play even when the servers are overloaded (the way direct IP addresses used to do in old PC games)?

I apologize for not asking a clearer question. I was actually just interested in buying the game, but only if it has public matchmaking built-in for finding anonymous pick-up groups, instead of needing an external Discord server to swap friend codes on.


Friendcode is basically a token: lets have a game - call me on this burner number. we have game.

.>..x###.////3~~E`~,~X>>----- XXNXN x0x

then I know that youre solardev.. and we can be friends in future

(but this model is exploitable in ways, which is premise of many threads here)


I get that, but how does that help with overloaded servers? Unless the friend code is actually an IP address for peer to peer networking (which is rare in online games because of cheating), it still has to go through some central server.

At a minimum, the server would connect the tokens to players in a database. But usually I think they do more than that, such as hosting lobbies, punching through NAT, and in many cases, actually hosting the games themselves and being the authority for all the state.

In that case I don't see how tokens would save any load over matchmaking.


>>the server would connect the tokens to players in a database*

the additional telemetry data for such connections and also unknown tracking from the clients is what is load.

unless you know what is coming going from to each client, and reqs of that connection btwn clients on the DB... have a bad time?

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Or am I an idiot.


Yeah that seems to be the standard and very descriptive.


Not everyone I connect to on signal is a friend. same for e.g. journalists or government people who use Signal.


Why not "invite code" like Discord does it? This is literally the same thing.

Its a code, inviting other people to speak to you.




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