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David Coombes avatar image
David Coombes asked

syncing offline play

It's been asked before - how does one manage offline events in game being synchronised, such as a player buying 3 tokens online, then playing without an internet connection and using those tokens, and then reconnecting and needing to update the player data with the consumptions.

As of 2018 (and as early as 2016), the recommendation was to handle this manually.

https://community.playfab.com/questions/563/207643538-Best-practice-for-caching-and-off-line.html

https://community.playfab.com/questions/974/211731367-Sync-offline-save-data.html

The comments say PlayFab is looking into managing this itself. Is there any progress here or are we required to maintain a client-based event tracking system? In the event of the latter, may I recommend adding such advice to the documentation as offline play is something pretty much any game besides networked games will face, and that's especially true of mobile games.

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Seth Du avatar image
Seth Du answered

I believe what Brendan has stated in the second reference thread is quite clear that even there are many work around solution for handling offline play, most of these methods cannot be considered as a safe solution.

As long as there are offline play scenario, there can be cheats during the offline duration. I believe a work around solution should be maintaining an local event system and when the player get connected to the Internet, these event can be uploaded somewhere like Cloud Script for verification, then sync the players’ all data according to those events. However, if the events logs are very large, the execution time/frequency limits can be exceeded. You may achieve a balance between security and efficiency via selecting only key events for verification.

In a word, the most important thing for keeping a game “online” is to sync with server to avoid abusive/cheating. Like Brendan has mentioned, the most secure solution is that only provide a different play mode when offline that has zero(or very little) impact on main game data.

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David Coombes avatar image David Coombes commented ·

Which is fine in principle, but games have to be playable offline. I cannot expect my local, single-player shooter to maintain an internet connection on every device including mobile phones. An always-on connection does not go down well with gamers for anything that's not an online game. And an 'offline mode' is not appropriate for many, if not the majority, of games.

Taking a fairly well known game as example, Fallout Shelter was cross platform with synchronised saves. I could play it on mobile without internet connection to save battery, and then choose to enable internet for async and carry on on PC. This strikes me as the typical usage case for any non-networked game.

A robust offline syncing method is clearly necessary. I hope after talking about it for three years, PlayFab invest more into its implementation. ;) It doesn't have to be perfectly secure. For single player games, it doesn't matter if someone chooses to cheat and unlock a load of junk as long as they can't cheat the purchasing of content, for which they'd be online and logged in.

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Seth Du avatar image Seth Du ♦ David Coombes commented ·

I believe Fallout Shelter may not be a classical LiveOps sample. LiveOps will be more important for those competitive games like MOBA, MMO, FPS and yes, if it is single player games, it doesn't matter if players cheat as we may cheat Borderlands 3 meanwhile it doesn't affect online multi playing(it seems they won't verify anything). I assume players only require cloud saving or syncing progress between multiple devices for Fallout Shelter.

Hence, I believe this depends on how players pay attention to the fairness of the game. Casual, no competition involved or single player game will have less anti-cheat requirement. An exception is Gacha games, as far as I know they need a very high level of anti-cheat requirements, otherwise customer churn rate will be high.

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