Valve P2P networking broken for more than 2 months
Valve's P2P networking has been suffering major, systemic issues for over two months, predominantly affecting players in Israel and other Middle Eastern countries. Gamers report significant lag in P2P titles like Street Fighter 6, while cross-play and other non-Steam P2P games remain unaffected. The Hacker News discussion quickly dives into the technical details, highlighting Valve's reputation for both brilliant engineering and persistent, peculiar bugs.
The Lowdown
A critical issue has plagued Valve's P2P networking for more than two months, causing severe performance degradation for players, particularly in Israel. The problem manifests as high latency, rendering many P2P games unplayable for affected users.
- Players in Israel experience pings of around 120ms when playing PC-to-PC via Steam Networking, compared to 60-80ms with European players and 5-10ms for PC-to-PS5 cross-play.
- The issue is widespread across multiple ISPs in Israel and potentially affects other Middle Eastern countries, though it does not impact games using alternative P2P solutions (e.g., Tekken 8).
- Community efforts to resolve the problem through game support or ISPs have been unsuccessful, leading players to the issue tracker.
- Investigations on the GitHub issue suggest the problem stems from STUN failures, forcing connections to relay through high-latency servers.
- A community-discovered workaround involves replacing
steamwebrtc.dllfiles with older versions in game directories, indicating a specific Steam update in March likely introduced the bug.
The ongoing nature of this bug highlights the complexities of maintaining a global networking infrastructure and the frustration experienced by a significant segment of the gaming community.
The Gossip
Valve's Virtue and Vexations
Commenters observe a common pattern with Valve: incredibly talented developers alongside a tendency for bizarre, long-standing bugs. They muse on how a company with such high-caliber engineers can allow such significant issues to persist, suggesting a potential need for more 'average' devs to handle maintenance.
Open Source Sleuthing
Many users expressed appreciation for the open nature of the GitHub issue tracker, where community members can collaboratively diagnose problems, share symptoms, theorize causes, and even discover workarounds. This collective debugging effort is lauded as a core benefit of transparent development processes.
Protocol Puzzles & Packet Problems
The technical discussion quickly honed in on STUN (Session Traversal Utilities for NAT) failures as the root cause, leading to connections being routed through high-latency relay servers instead of direct P2P links. Speculation about government packet inspection was briefly raised but quickly dismissed by other users, who pointed out that changing DLLs wouldn't resolve such issues and P2P traffic isn't typically HTTPS.