Background and Problem
High Ping Issues in Gaming
In gaming, delays between a player's actions and the game's responses can significantly degrade the experience and could be the deciding factor between winning and losing. When the server is located on a different continent from the player, data must travel vast distances, causing delays. Edge nodes address this problem by positioning servers closer to players, thus reducing latency.
For example, playing Valorant on a US server from Singapore results in high ping, which can ruin the gaming experience. To mitigate this, Valorant hosts servers globally to be closer to users and minimize latency.
Blockchain Finality
Blockchain technology is often criticized for its long finality time. Despite having sub-second block times, the time required to ensure immutability of transactions (due to the consensus design) remains significant.
Block Time != Latency
Block time is commonly misunderstood as latency. However, these are not the same. Developers can adjust the block time, say to 10ms, but this does not necessarily speed up the chain. Rather, it could destabilize the chain and increase its size due to the rapid production of blocks.
Latency, in contrast, is the delay users experience from initiating a transaction to receiving confirmation. It includes the round-trip time to the RPC node, twice the block time, and the polling interval. Which is approximately round trip time to RPC node + 2 * block time + polling interval
Future blockchain technologies may abandon the use of traditional block times, favoring dynamic or entirely new mechanisms that better support scalability and efficiency.
Light Speed Limitation
The speed of light is a constant at approximately 3*10^8 m/s , and it cannot be increased. This sets a fundamental limit on the minimum latency achievable on a global scale. Theoretically, light takes about 130ms to circumnavigate the globe, resulting in a minimum global round trip ping of 260ms. Realistically, including various overheads and inefficiencies in blockchain consensus mechanisms, a global latency under 500ms is impractical due to these physical and technical constraints.
No player would tolerate a game with 500ms ping, which underscores the need for solutions like simulating transactions from closer servers via edge nodes.
Expensive Blockchain Storage
Blockchain storage is inherently expensive due to the necessity of permanence and replication across all nodes. In gaming, however, many real-time actions, such as player movement, do not need to be permanently stored. This can be efficiently handled using an Edge Node P2P game state transport system, which relays the game state across clients. These clients listen to game-related P2P gossip topics, while an edge sequencer submits proofs and state roots that can later be verified and reconstructed on the blockchain when necessary.
Expensive Gaming Infrastructure
Deploying gaming servers worldwide is a costly and challenging task. Not only are the servers expensive, but skilled staff are also required to maintain this global infrastructure, leading to high personnel costs.
Major game publishers spend millions annually on infrastructure to ensure low latency for global players. This investment is critical in providing a smooth, responsive gaming experience that meets the expectations of players worldwide.
larActivision’s annual investor reports, where server costs are bundled with customer service expenses, give a better sense of the expense: in 2017, the company spent around $1 billion on game operations.
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