When a player hosted a game, their computer sent a heartbeat packet to the Index Server every few seconds. cataloged these heartbeats in a hash table mapped to the game’s name, difficulty, and latency. When another player searched for "Baal runs 001," Index Server 2 responded with the IP address and port of the hosting player (after NAT traversal).
Why? Because of trust. In a P2P world, the client is in control. And when the client is in control, hackers thrive. Duping exploits in Diablo II, map hacks in Starcraft, and drop hacks in Warcraft III were all possible because the server (the Index) didn't verify the gameplay; it only indexed the room. bnet index server 2
: Ensuring that a player's rank updates immediately after a win while the Index Server is serving a cached version of that same ladder to other players. When a player hosted a game, their computer