Wuumaster

Join Date 02/2010

Multiplayer performance issues

or 'Is my machine screwing things up?'

Recently purchased this game and have been playing against the AI a bunch - figured I'd give online a shot in a 'noob' custom game, 4 vs 4 Exile.

Now, when I play Single Player, the game runs fine. I've tweaked my video settings so that I can play with a consistent frame rate, and I usually have a Sim Speed of 9 or 10. However, while playing this game online other players were complaining of lag (and I noticed the game freezing as if it were waiting for stuff to happen. I can mouse places and select things, but nothing was moving/attacking.) I was informed that I had accumulated 10ms of lag time already.

While that's a little foreign to me, I checked my Sim Speed (8, far from the lowest at 4) and my Ping to other players ranged between 50 to 360. Trying to be courteous I dropped from the game and hit up PCPitStop.com and SpeedTest.net/PingTest.net to check out my connection.

According to SpeedTest.net, my Download is 2.14mb/s and my Upload is 0.68mb/s. PingTest.net grades my connection as A (0% loss, Ping 33, Jitter 1ms, from Ontario, Canada to Germantown, WI, a distance of 400 miles.). My connection does go through a router, however I have never had issues with it in the past, nor with any other online game (playing SupCom over a LAN didn't have any problems).

I'll try it again sometime with the router removed, but I'm not convinced it'll help. Is there anything else I can check/do to resolve this?

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awuffleablehedgie

Join Date 04/2009

+60

is that .68 MBps or .68Mbps. There is a very big difference between the two.

[URL=http://www.speedtest.net][/URL]

If you're capital B you need to mulitply by 8 to get little b which is the standardized measurement of transfer speeds (including internet).

If you indeed have only .68 Mbps you won't be able to play more than 2v2 and even that is iffy. If you're actually 5 Mbps then you should have sufficient bandwidth for at the very least a 3v3. You should be able to play 5v5 no issue as well but can't promise.

Your Sim Speed is fine. Anything above 0 is strictly okay and you should notice nothing as long as it is 2 or above (which my old labtop played at when giants hit the table on Levi).

Are you on wireless? That sometimes has issues with Demigod, you can try port forwarding if needed.

But it sounds like it wasn't your fault. The game has a built in lag-tolerance of 350 milliseconds, which means even if you have 5 ms ping to someone else your commands won't execute for a full 350 ms. Any ping below 350 should have no impact on the game, but typically it is a bad idea with someone > 300 in the lobby to play since you have very little wiggle room in case anyone spikes.

It sounds like whoever was at 360 to you had a bad connection and was lagging the game for everyone. Play a few more games and hit tab every minute or so just to do a sanity check on your pings (esp if it is lagging). If you're only high ping to one person, it probably isn't your fault or you two are just not geographically compatible (AUS and EU tend to have issues, for example).

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If that is all correct, it is probably not your connection or your computer. It was most likely someone else's connection that was causing the problem. If you have a firewall, try disabling it.

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Looks like it is the upload speed - funny though, speed test says it's higher than the average for my ISP. Sigh.

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awuffleablehedgie

Join Date 04/2009

+60

Quoting Wuumaster,

reply 3

Looks like it is the upload speed - funny though, speed test says it's higher than the average for my ISP. Sigh.

I've played 2v2 games on a cellphone and so has pacov. You could probably play some 2v2 if you tried.

Just turn off ALL extra programs. Skype, Instant Messaging programs, email, everything.

Another possibility is that your ISP is filtering out P2P connections.

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What's really odd though, I can have 4 computers connected to my router all playing World of Warcraft and running Ventrillo in the back ground without issues, and I've also had 2 computers playing Left 4 Dead 2 with Ventrillo in the background HOSTING the game on a local server without issues.

The kicker though, is that off all the packages the ISPs in my area offer, only one package has a >1Mb upload rate, and it's 2x the price of my current. So I couldn't even play 3v3 or greater even if I wanted to, unless I move cities.

Well, at least I know what the problem is.

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Your upload speed is fine for at least 3v3. Im not sure for 4v4 couse i play 3v3 games with upload speed of 0.25megabits/secon(Mbps). But do turn all other programs like ventrillo,msg, torents and such.

Your other option is to contact your ISP and ask about their p2p protocol policy.Does they throttle p2p traffic is the question.

And try to find games with low ping.Not above 300 ms.

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