Gamemax.org is the pits

W

WiT8litZ

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I am not the kinda person to go all out and piss on anyone's parade. But I can't keep quiet anymore.

Scraping together some good faith I tried this service again. It starts out full of hopes and dreams, giving you a solid 250ms no matter where you go. Dalaran, Ulduar, etc. But the moment a boss fight starts, with or without vent, it never fails to disconnect. NEVER. Totally unusable, no matter which of the servers I try. No matter which instance.

Is there anyone out that who can honestly and truly say that Gamemax works for them, not only for mucking around IF or doing dailies, but doing some proper raiding, Ulduar, Naxx, hardmodes, softmodes, full out? I doubt it.
 
Agree with you there. Was a pure pleasure to level/quest with gamemax but come doing Wintergrasp/AV or any boss fight it tends to kick me off. Or give MASSIVE lag spikes.

Would be nice if it actually worked properly because made such an impact on my game play having 250ms that going back to 400+ms on normal unshapped is kinda hard.
 
Strange thing here.

During the Beta phase of GMax, my latency was fine during Wintergrasp. (Didn't get into 25 man raids at that stage).

I reactivated my account last month and I must say, the service has really gone to *****. Constant lag/DC in WG, and also in 25 main raid boss fights.

I am gonna miss my 280ms in Arena :(

But cba to pay for something that doesn't work properly. I have in fact emailed them as well and here is their response.

Hi there,

Ok there are a number of things you can try and i will try to name a few
here.

* Make sure that you don't have the registry hacks applied as per our
FAQ as they will make your game lag out.
* Update your network card drivers as we have had a few users who had
problems until they did an upgrade.
* Try a different socks prog (eg if you used freecap try sockscap and
vice versa)
* Try a different server as you ISP might be having routing issues to
the server you are using.

If all of the above fails please try the below as your line could be
having some noise/fault and the connection could be timing out.

You see what happens when you are using Gamemax your connection is
boosted somewhat and the fault tolerance drops, so when normally your
game would just freeze(packet loss) and after some time everything would
unfreeze and run in 'fast' mode for a few sec's, thats packet loss and
you had a interruption in connection. Now when the same happens when
connecting via Gamemax if there is no response for a while your putty
could cut the connection and treat it as a timeout. This would be
especially noticeable on wireless connections as packet loss is a lot
more common (read through the FAQ when you get a chance ).

There is no setting in putty to increase the 'dead connection' timeout
but there is a windows setting that could help. There are actually 3 of
them you can try and more details about all of them are in the links below.

Here is a link to the putty FAQ, take note of point 7.10 and 7.11.
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/faq.html#faq-idleout

Here are instructions on how to add the reg key.
http://www.neophob.com/serendipity/index.php?/archives/92-Putty-SSH-Timeouts.html


And microsoft knowledge base details on the registry key. Please take
note of the 'TcpMaxConnectRetransmissions' and
'TcpMaxDataRetransmissions' descriptions.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;314053

We truly hope that helps so please let us know.

Best Regards
GameMax Team
Click to expand...

I have done what they suggested and nothing works. I think I will be canceling my account with them.
 
I can't use Gamemax in Wintergrasp but didn't have a problem in 25 man raiding. Having said that I don't pve anymore (not since the Ulduar patch) so can't say if it has changed or not.

I seem to be fine in arenas with Gamemax @ around 350ms.

I have tried other services with great success but decided to support the South African one. Give the following a try: PingFU (the Iris service/product) and YourFreedom.

I have a YourFreedom account and might switch to it permanently but haven't decided as yet. YourFreedom tunnels through port 80, which seems to offer a higher degree of stability as I am quite convinced that someone is shaping my traffic ... somewhere :/

Furthermore I have noticed a improvement since switching to FreeCap.
 
I emailed Gamemax last night to cancel my account, I wont try it again.

Thanks for the feedback Kuga, I have tried most of those options out of desperation already so I think it is fair to say that the service just won't work for me. I'll look into YourFreedom or PingFU, but sadly if it costs anything more than Gamemax I won't be able to pay that either. Gamemax really was the lifeline SA WoW players were looking for but seems it just failed to deliver like most SA services do.
 
Man wouldn't it be nice to have a service's that are reliable and cheap and WORK...things like this make me want to move to where it would work :/

Keep thinking how awesome some South African players actually have to be to play with the latency we have. I don't think EU people always understand :P
 
lordneon said:
Man wouldn't it be nice to have a service's that are reliable and cheap and WORK...things like this make me want to move to where it would work :/

Keep thinking how awesome some South African players actually have to be to play with the latency we have. I don't think EU people always understand :P
Click to expand...

Players in the EU do have issues as well. Although the norm is to have far lower latency that what players in SA have to deal with, in the EU we have our share of idiots masquerading as ISP's. In my guild we have 2 or 3 player who could almost guarrentee will DC during the raid. They arent South Africans. One is from Netherlands and the others from Greece, I think. Or somewhere near the Balkans.

Even In the UK, there are parts of London where there are known problem areas.

But I have to say that generally, its not where near as bad as you have it in SA.
 
These services are not legal and can get your account banned.

I almost lost my account because of it.

Greetings,

Thank you for your e-mail. Following an investigation into actions taken against this account we believe this account may have been accessed via a Proxy Service.

We appreciate there are circumstances when use of a Proxy can be beneficial however such services are routinely used to attempt to hide the actions of Online Trading companies and users attempting to use exploitative third party programs. As such, we do not support the use of Proxy services and if you continue to use these, we regret that this may result in further suspensions placed on your account.
Click to expand...

Email from blizzard!

I got my account back only because I convinced them that I was using it to improve my latency, due to South Africa having crappy latency.

The service was ok though. It was giving me 80ms less then my normal connection.
 
lordneon said:
Man wouldn't it be nice to have a service's that are reliable and cheap and WORK...things like this make me want to move to where it would work :/

Keep thinking how awesome some South African players actually have to be to play with the latency we have. I don't think EU people always understand :P
Click to expand...

When I stayed in Germany, I played with 22ms :S, same laptop.

/cry
 
Interesting @agerbon. Always thought Blizz would say something about proxies if it bugged them, seems they have.
 
I played with a completely stable 40ms connection when I lived in the UK. It was an uncapped 2mbps line from BT as I recall and only cost in the region of 10 pounds a month. :(
 
If I stop playing WoW, I could easily cover the monthly payment on a dirtbike with all the cash I pump into Azeroth each month :(
 
Last edited:
The problem is not that proxies are against the ToS but they are often used as a front for Gold Sellers so from time to time Blizz smacks down a ban on all users connecting from a proxy IP Address.
We've had it happen before to guildmates.

That being said, Gamemax is so small it flies under the radar in this regard.
Unfortunately it's completely useless for Raiding with.

I also gave it a whirl but I canceled because as MT I could not afford to DC every time the Raid started to AoE.
 
Yep sucks trying to tank and u get dc'd when aoe or boss fights start. But since i OT'd naxx 25 last night i though i would give it a go...and for the 1st time I did not DC once...very odd its not very stable still but man its nice to raid with 250-280ms. i can actually intervene and stuff in time :/
 
Any Gamemax person here to give some insight into why this service is not raid-friendly?
 
From what I understand, they limit the bandwidth each connection uses in order to share it out.
Unfortunately this has the downside of disconnecting you whenever you get spikes of information, AoE being a prime example.
You might possibly be able to get around this by disabling any mods that share info and your combatlog but personally I'd rather just raid without it.
The lower latency is nice but I used to Raid on 1Kms so the 400-600ms I get now is low enough for me to play efficiently.
 
I think I might be the exception here. I have been using gamemax since January already, with no issues. I have stable latency of 250-320 in Dalaran throughout all other places. I raid Ulduar 25 3 times a week, and although I (sometimes) get a spike which lasts about 5-10 seconds, my connection is stable on the same average latency.

And when I say sometimes, I mean that in 3 raid periods, I might get a spike once or twice, i.e. once or twice in a 12-15 hour period of 25 man raiding per week.

I use iBurst as ISP, dunno if that could have any impact.

Without gamemax I am also on a stable latency of about 500-600, without dc. Maybe I am just lucky and should keep quiet....
 
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