Only a few days before the release of the Xbox Series X and Series S, there is more good news for gamers. The party chat will be safer for you. How to do that is explained by developer Bill Ridmann.
It won’t be long before you can hold your Xbox Series X or Series S in your hands. The official release is on November 10, 2020.
From testers, we already know that the new Xbox is supposed to be fast and quiet. The feature of backward compatibility is also known to let your old Xbox gems shine properly with a performance boost.
On reddit, a developer explained what other important change is being worked on. And this concerns the safety of everyone participating in group chats.
Group chats no longer P2P – Why is this important?
What about party chats? This type of chat has accompanied the Xbox prominently since the One. It’s the feature you use on the console to communicate with groups. However, this system has also posed some problems.
This was problematic: For a long time, the Xbox party chat used so-called peer-to-peer (P2P) connections. The problem with this system is that it makes it very easy to find out the IP address of the users connected to it. This information can be common for hackers. Additionally, users who know your IP address can launch a DDoS attack on you, thus bringing down your internet.
It’s clear that this problem needs to be resolved. On reddit, players warn others. “Now that Rainbow Six: Siege is in Game Pass, I wanted to remind you not to accept every random group invite,” says a thread (via reddit). There, too, DDoS is warned against.
This is new: A developer responded to the reddit thread. Bill Ridmann is a software engineer at Microsoft and is working on the development of the Xbox. He writes under the warning that P2P is a known problem and that they’ve been working on a solution in the background for some time.
More and more connections will now run through servers, and P2P is decreasing more and more. Soon, there should be no groups that are based on P2P anymore.
He mentioned that he also saw concerns regarding the mobile app. However, through the mobile app, groups have always been on servers and “… and the IP of your smartphones was never shown to others,” he explains.
Ridmann also confirmed that the chat should not feel different for you. It’s just about the safety of gamers.
How do you like the change? Is this a problem that has been bothering you for a long time, or did you not have it on your radar at all?
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