MEA MP will be P2P. Thoughts?

The only excuse for this is that "nobody else is doing dedicated servers so we won't either."

Entropy and mediocrity have become the new standard. I'm starting to believe people who say another video game crash is coming, I've had about enough of this shit.

I've never played a game with a multiplayer component that did not lag. SWTOR lagged (individual separated servers), BnS lagged and then some (cross-server), and Revelation (a single mega-server) lagged. In the P2P ME3 model, I do have a horrible experience once in a while, but more often than not, I can play a Vanguard just fine for my twitch level. (and, yes, yes, I am a noob gamer). At least you do not have to re-roll on another server to play with someone in a non-server game... unless, of course, you game version is incompatible.

If there is a fabulous game out there, where you do not come for lag, and stay for DCs, I sure hope it's going to be used as a model industry-wide. :)

The game engine can be part of the performance problems.

When Battlefield 4 was released, engine side netcode troubles were a huge part of the issues. Servers had a very low tick rate of 10hz, leading to all kinds of trouble like deaths appearing as insta kills (because 10hz basically meant that every weapon firing faster than 600 RPM - which was like 90% of available guns - would deliver the damage of more than one bullet during a single server tick) which in turn caused a lot of kill trades and the occasional death behind cover.

However, DICE LA put in a ton of effort to improve Frostbite's netcode, and after a year or two of CTE (community test environment), Battlefield 4 had excellent netcode running at 60hz if I remember correctly. Likewise, Battlefield 1 has pretty good netcode going on right out of the box. Overall, Frostbite 3 has good netcode in its current state - after all, it allows for 64 player matches, and if just one player fires a shotgun in a match, the engine calculates the trajectory of over a dozen individual pellets, adjusting for gravity and air friction, i.e. bullet drop and bullet drag.

So, the engine netcode is good, and we are not looking at 64 player matches in MEAMP anyway, but at four player co op, a tiny, tiny fraction of the net traffic that a BF1 match would generate. If you get lag in MEAMP, I can only think of two reasons: bad coding by the devs (i.e. BioWare, not DICE and their Frostbite engine), or a matchmaking system that puts a guy from the UK into a match with someone from Australia, Brazil and the Ukraine (host). Smart matchmaking is an important part of the coding too. Vermintide for example searches for matches/other players in three different distance ranges, starting with players close to your location and only switching to a bigger distance if it's not successful.

Given the quality of Frostbite 3's netcode and the size of the matches it can run, this should be hard to mess up for a lowly 4 player co op... but hey, DAMP is a thing.

P2P has it's upsides and downsides.

Upside
P2P is probably THE reason ME3MP is still working. Since it requires only a couple dedicated servers for matchmaking, it doesn't cost a lot to keep everything running.

P2P is just as good as dedicated servers if you're paired with people that have decent internet and are on the same continent. ME3MP and DAIMP didn't have noticeable lag on my side or at least nothing different than a dedicated server.

When a dedicated server crashes, everybody on the server lose their connexion and the games are "forfeited". In P2P, only the current game migrates to another host and that's it. Not all players of the community are paying the price for 1 crash.

Downside
Players are hostage of who's the host. If the host is too far away or have a bad connection, you get a lot of lag.

The host has some advantage because he doesn't lag at all, however small the lag is.

My opinion
Personally, I much prefer P2P for the longevity of the game. I can deal with the downsides just fine.

I do understand how this can be a problem in countries where the internet is not as reliable, but at that point it's not really the games fault...

P2P , PvP ...peebee

No pvp, that was stated but BioWare. peertopeer or piertopier if you live on a dock by the seaside.

Seriously, where do you get this PvP info? I hope it's just a bad joke.

Whew... P2P is fine, I'm so damn1337, I need some delicious Japanese lag with a side of Korean supermodels.

In the case of SWToR (another Bioware game, incidentally), the "lag" was 99% caused by the crappy unfinished Hero Engine that Bioware was in such a hurry they finished it themselves, did a sucktacular job of it, and made it incompatible with the subsequently completed Hero Engine, and all of its updates.

Nasa could host dedicated servers for that game, and it would still be a slideshow.

yeah that's what it all came down to. 

wrong, titanfall 1 and 2 have dedicated servers, and DAI too

and dedicated servers don't solve a anything, the lag is still there

and the worst part is that in some world regions there are not enough players, like in DAI, is just stopped playing DAI MP for there is nobody, the server is dedicated and the connection is laggy AF

so, dedicated servers have only negative points, nothing in favor

How about "Setting up and maintaining enough dedicated servers around the world to provide the best connection quality for our entire playerbase is prohibitively expensive, considering how relatively small the playerbase for ME3MP was."

Plus, dedicated servers are not a magic bullet that fixes all lag. While they're definitely better in most cases, if the game's netcode is not up to snuff, or your ISP is bending you over the barrel, you won't notice much of an improvement over P2P.