How Syntropy can make gaming faster, safer, and more competitive
Our technology is a turnkey solution for solving key e-sports challenges, both large and small.
The e-sports industry has grown dramatically over the past five years. With roots in Asia, large competitions have reached the United States and European markets. Large communities of players across several gaming universes now regularly compete for multi-million dollar prizes and championships.
The entire industry is worth several billion dollars, with several individual teams valued at more than $300 million apiece. Syntropy’s technology can be used at scale (in major tournaments) or in smaller formats (at friendly tournaments or public servers) to solve many of the industry’s biggest issues concerning performance and security.
It’s not always easy to coordinate safe and competitive e-sports competitions. The Internet today is not designed for public high-stakes games, resulting in foul play between teams as well as outside actors.
For example, a Dota 2 competition with an $18 million prize pool, 100,000 in-person fans, and 200 million concurrent streams was paused because one of the teams created a botnet and began running attacks against the competition. On top of security concerns, organizers also must ensure performance parity so players are not competing against both each other and latency. This has proven to be a large-scale challenge for such a fledgeling industry.
Our team specializes in autonomously creating and managing secure, optimized networks — big or small. Gaming is a natural fit. By providing security, performance, and facilitation, Syntropy can ensure an equitable and safe experience for players across any game or location.
Equity in Performance
Connecting machines from around the world to a single server is a challenging task across all industries, not just gaming. Latency, packet loss, and jitter become apparent with network congestion. When the difference between winning or losing a game with a million-dollar prize pool is measured in milliseconds, a solution to this problem becomes critical.
Syntropy provides an out of the box solution to this problem. By using our smart routing protocol, you can connect machines in any location or type across our network in 500+ locations across 200+ providers worldwide. For any connection on the Syntropy network, we have at least four routes that act as fail safes. One is connected through the public Internet, and three are connected through our network. In the event a route becomes congested, your traffic will automatically re-route, ensuring a consistent and equitable experience across all players within a game.
The gaming industry is a global phenomenon where you have players in South Korea playing against players in California. When you have such wide geographical dispersion, there must be a protocol in place to ensure that each of the player’s connections have every opportunity to get the fastest response time available. By having many concurrent connections instead of one, Syntropy levels the playing field, and competition becomes more reliant on skill rather than network performance.
Syntropy is actively developing and testing its smart routing protocol to bring it to mainstream gaming audiences. The network is running and you can already witness optimizations being made in real time.
See optimizations being made here.
Security in Gaming
Syntropy Stack is a flexible solution that encrypts all connections made within a network through WireGuard — the most advanced VPN protocol today. This encryption protocol thwarts attackers, even if they connect via a machine within the internal network.
With Syntropy, there is no front door, and the risk is compartmentalized to separate connections. Each connection is a unique and isolated event that occurs when a player is connected. There is also heightened visibility within the network through our UI to monitor the services within each endpoint, identifying any malicious actors in real-time.
Server owners and tournament organizers will be able to use Syntropy tools to create secure networks, even without extensive networking knowledge, making servers prone to DDOS attacks and unauthorized access.
The gaming industry has already seen a windfall of investment among organizers trying to provide the most advanced servers available for players to have an enjoyable experience. Investments in hardware will prove futile if users cannot be protected on these servers. It’s like purchasing a Lamborghini with no locking mechanism and the keys always inside.
Syntropy not only solves the problem, but its implementation is quite simple. Players can install the Syntropy Application on their machines, use an organizer-defined configuration to connect to the Syntropy-enabled gaming server, and begin playing in a secure fashion. We see the Syntropy Stack as a tailor-fit solution for organizers to dispel any fear of foul play.
Facilitating Growth
Discord currently has 6.7 million servers across their network, a substantial percentage of which are gaming related. A single server can have up to 500,000 members, and will facilitate interaction, communication, and gameplay.
With so many users connected to one server, it is not surprising that there are both security and performance concerns among players. Traditionally, game servers have relied on vertical scaling rather than horizontal scaling, buying more and more powerful machines to handle the influx of players and games on a network. This can be unsustainable, especially as popularity among specific games mounts.
Syntropy Stack focuses on autonomous horizontal scaling. Through our API and SDK, networks can be automatically created whenever one is needed. Take CS:GO for example. An API call facilitated with a Discord Bot to the Syntropy network can create a network, and connect any number of players to the network through the Syntropy Application on each player’s machine.
This strategy has many benefits. Congestion in a network with only a single running game will be minimal, and there aren’t hundreds of thousands of other users connected to a server that may want to disrupt it. On top of that, organizers are given the architectural tools needed to design an autonomous game lobby that can be scaled to any degree as more and more players join.
Syntropy+Gaming
The public Internet was not designed for fast and secure gameplay. Vertical scaling of gameplay servers is putting a band-aid on a wound that will continue to grow as more gamers try to find competitive outlets to test their skills against players around the world.
The Syntropy team has taken our approach to games such as CS:GO and Minecraft to prove that autonomous facilitation of secure and optimized gameplay is not only possible, but simple using our solution. Organizers can gain control of their communities on a single game level using rules-based configurations for autonomous game creation, they can secure connections within a game to reduce the threat of bad actors, and ultimately deliver an optimized gameplay experience to anyone who chooses to compete.
Syntropy is currently testing it's connectivity features in real-world gaming applications. In a Syntropy CS:GO Tournament, all players will connect to the Syntropy supported gaming server through a Syntropy Windows application, allowing to test underlying pieces of technology by simultaneously connecting hundreds of players through secure and dynamic VPN connections.
