Honestly the games issue might be out of day. Game devs have access to great services to punch through NAT at this point.

Tech finds a way…

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reincarnate0x14 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

So we acknowledge v4 and CG-NAT are a problem but don't want to use the already available solution because game developers took it upon themselves to DEFEAT NAT :)

That just reminded me of a peer protocol I worked on a long time ago that used other hosts to try to figure out which hosts were getting translated. Kind of like a reverse TOR. If that was detected, the better peering hosts would send them each other's local and public addresses so they could start sending UDP packets to each other, because the NAT devices wouldn't expect the TCP handshake first and so while the first few rounds didn't make it through, it caused the NAT device(s) to create the table entries for itself.

Was it Hamachi that was the old IPX-over-IP tunneling? I'm fairly sure it used similar tricks. IPX-over-IP is also done on DOSBOX, which incidentally made it possible to play Master of Orion 2 with friends in other continents.

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coryrc 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Which has led to every game needing a central server running, forcing centralization where p2p used to work great. Also how Skype was able to scale on a budget, something now blocked, forcing you to raise money for more ideas than before. Running a matrix(?) node should be as simple as clicking install and it's just there, next time you're with your friends, nfc tap or whatever and your servers talk to each other directly forever going forward. But nope, there always is a gatekeeper now and they need money and that poisons everything.

	▲	everforward an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I don’t think VOIP was a major factor in game centralization. The big one was selling cosmetics (easily unlock able server-side in community servers), and to some extent being able to police voice chat more. Major game publishers didn’t want to be in the news about the game with the most slurs or child grooming or what not.

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viraptor an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Nat hole punching works... most of the time. There are many edge cases and weird/broken networks which you just can't work around in standard ways. You get to see all kinds of broken setups if you work at VoIP providers. That's why everyone will use a central proxy server as the last resource - you'll mostly notice it only because of a higher ping.