Originally Posted by
Gorman
I guess the servers are just closer to you then :P
Over here in Perth, close to nowhere, even if I am using a line jacked directly in to one of our 10gb/s trunks, I will get at least a couple of hundred ms ping from most games. I guess the international lines are not so flash...
:<
Actually I'm a few thousand miles from the majority of servers (which are generally in the USA), just most UK ISPs haven't jumped onto the traffic shaping bandwagon.
On that subject if things go the way USA ISPs want you're all going to go through hell regarding online gaming unless you pay extra to avoid getting throttled. Fingers crossed they don't cos it's a massive cunt trick & IMO if you've paid for a connection you should be able to do whatever you want on it.
Originally Posted by
Organ
also, one reason why we might need faster internet connections is file size. 3 years ago the average file size of a game demo was 700mb or less. now the average file size is 2-3gb. that coupled with people who don't want to wait for their demos or games to download would be a good reason for increases in internet speed.
Originally Posted by
Vox
With respect to Organ's comments on game demo file size: The size of a game now-a-days largely seems to be dependent on the largest physical medium being used to distribute the games, however games have diverged where the internet is concerned, most indy games have considerably less pre-made content and considerably more generated content, meaning they download over slower lines just fine. It's hard to say the games industry is dictating the speed of internet, I'd look towards torrents and media streaming to be the two main uses for fast internet.
I've gotta agree that game downloading's a ballache, especially when your line's unreliable like mine. I dislike using disks for PC gaming, they're inconveniant, and there's normally a version on a download service like Steam.
Services like Steam are pretty cool, but only once you've got your stuff downloaded. Having 12 hour+ download times before being able to use something I've bought proper gets on my tits.
Oddly enough my ISP excels with torrents, I can easily hammer through a few gig in the same amount of time a game service takes for a few hundred meg.
Gotta love router logs:
Uptime: 5 days, 19:21:28
Bandwidth (Up/Down) [kbps/kbps]: 448 / 3,872
Data Transferred (Sent/Received) [GB/GB]: 49.06 / 92.09