jessebright

This was not a business decision.

To be clear (one programmer to another), after handshaking and matchmaking occurs gameplay traffic between peers on the same LAN is all routed locally.

AOE II utilizes a peer-to-peer game state synchronization architecture. Over the Steam network, establishing a peer-to-peer session (as opposed to a client-server connection) requires that each peer begin with an open channel of communication to the Steam servers.

When a peer-to-peer session is initiated each peer goes through a security token exchange process to establish their identity. This token exchange, facilitated by the Steam server authority, allows a peer to sign all of their outgoing messages to prevent message spoofing. During token exchange the server authority also confirms that each peer has not been banned for cheating, that they own a copy of the game, etc.

There are some anti-cheat and skill ranking caveats that are factored into the relationship between players on a LAN and the Steam authority, but once everyone finds each other, proves who they are, and the game has launched there is no longer any match relevant traffic that is sent through the Steam servers.

Hi, Jesse Bright here, the lead on Age of Empire II HD's network development.

We did not perform a complete re-write of the underlying networking architecture. Games are still going to be limited by the speed of the slowest player in the match.

That being said, there have been significant changes made to the way that player's connect with one another. For instance, issues with NAT traversal will no longer be a significant problem.

*edit

I should add that because of the inherent NAT traversal your traffic may be being routed through a proxy network without you realizing it. For the best performance you will want to bypass the proxy network by setting up port forwarding on your router. The ports you want to have open are as follows:

UDP 27000 to 27015 inclusive

UDP 27015 to 27030 inclusive

UDP 4380

UDP 3478 (Outbound)

UDP 4379 (Outbound)

We have ran many thousands of hours of large multiplayer games between our office in Seattle and the office of our testing firm on the other side of the country. This allowed us to very thoroughly test the core architecture, but the reality of deploying a highly competitive multiplayer game of this scale is that the end users are going to encounter connectivity issues that we never experienced during testing.

The good news is that we have developed very powerful tools for collecting network data that allow us to rapidly isolate individual issues. If you are able to reproduce a connectivity issue I ask that you please report it to our support forum in as much detail as possible. Before we can fix the problems we need to identify them and collect relevant technical data.

We are asking anyone experiencing connectivity issues to report the problem in this thread: http://steamcommunity.com/app/221380/discussions/2/828935361235943414/

*edit to add link

All multiplayer games that do not allow cheat codes are rated. There is an indicator of current global rank at the top of the Main Menu's multiplayer screen. Hovering over your rank will display your current win / loss record of ranked games.

Ranking is determined through a weighted scoring system called ELO. Team's of allied players influence each others rank, so if you ally with a low skill player and lose you will not be significantly penalized.