Gaming on international servers

The Shaping monster will never go away because it is used to fool the general users into thinking that the service that they are paying a fortune for is fast and efficient.

The service providers are in effect creating a subset of the internet, where browser is king.

When you get packet loss it means that you are so far at the back of the queue that your packet simply times out.

Eventually all games will begin to use port 80 for gaming, and then service providers be forced to install filters on port 80, to prevent the abuse of port 80, even though they caused the abuse.

These filters and associated hardware cost a fortune to setup and maintain, pushing up costs and the level of network complexity and expertese required, in addition to the existing cost of the shaping infrastructure.

But - the service providers look good to joe public until suddenly joe needs to do something else. Then joe starts asking questions, and starts to feel trapped and ripped off. But, that's just one joe.

The worst is that joe public will never ever be able to see just how badly they are being ripped off as more and more users are pushed into the same shaped channel, because the use of invisible proxies is so effective that the sharing factor is almost invisible.

I'd be really interested to know what the ratio is for any of the shaped packages.

My guess is that it's about 300/1.
 
lewstherin said:
Have a look at the UUNet Uncapped offering.

Unshaped and uncapped for less than the 4GB Telkom account. The main topic is in the "General ADSL discussions" section. A few guys here are already using it with good results.
Click to expand...

Unfortunately, UUNET have started to shape and port prioritation on some p2p's, (specially Torrents), because some users abused the unshaped service and UUNET were in fear of their bandwith.

But everything will go back to normal, as soon a solution will be found, on how to limit this abuse.
 
Celemasiko said:
Unfortunately, UUNET have started to shape and port prioritation on some p2p's, (specially Torrents), because some users abused the unshaped service and UUNET were in fear of their bandwith.

But everything will go back to normal, as soon a solution will be found, on how to limit this abuse.
Click to expand...

Now in a situation like this I can understand an ISP using traffic shaping to limit people abusing the system. Although it is pretty lame that ISPs don't have / aren't willing to provide enought bandwidth to their client base to effectively do as they please.
 
On the flip side - you get packeted by some schmuck - you pay. Doh
 
telkom must die

Dunno if its at all possible, but is there no way to 'spoof' the packets so that telcrap thinks they are destined for port 80?
 
karkas - the only spoof I know of is too change it to port 80, which means that your packet will request port 80 on the other side.
But - you get a piece of software called a port forwarder. It accepts TCPIP packets on one port and sends it to the destination on any other port and visa versa for the return data.
What you need is a computer right next to the game server that does nothing but do this.
Weeeeeeee.
 
I did run the "Experiment" before - April 2004:
Had a machine setup at work outsude the firewall that was configured (port forwarding) to accept incoming requests on port 80 and redirect them to the same machine on port 1433.
The flow is: MyHome(ADSL512).80 -> SAIX.80 -> IS.80 -> Work.80 -> Work.1433
Worked like a charm. Was playing BZFlag at that time. Had 4 people playing with no problems - but then that was an experiment on local only. Lag about 40ms. Straight, (No port forwarding) Lag about 40ms.
INTL Tests:
We then setup the same machine to forward our requests through to bzflag0.gamesunited.de in denmark, but that was more useless than going straight through to denmark. The flow is:
MyHome.80 -> Teklom.80 -> SAIX.80 -> IS.80 -> Work.80 -> Work.1433 -> IS.1433 -> SAIX.1433 -> UK.1433 -> Denmark.1433.
We found the bottleneck to be at IS.1433 -> SAIX.1433, IS/SAIX seem to do some shaping there.
I need to find somebody in the UK that will port-forward for us, so that we can bypass the IS -> SAIX bottleneck. No luck finding that somebody in the UK as of yet.
Any volunteers ?
But - the software did work fine, no noticeable difference when it does the forwarding.
 
stoke said:
Simple - charge per MB. You abuse - you pay. Duh.
Click to expand...


Two solultions according to UUNET.

1. p2p shaping during the day and unshaped over night. (because of bandwith probs with the business people)

2. 10 GB cap only on p2p and everything over charged per MB. Everything else remains unshaped.
 
nicvw said:
I play Star Wars Galaxies a MMORPG, my character is on a European server. Thanks to Telkom's wonderful packet shaping / port prioritization my gaming experience is worse than I had on ISDN. :mad:
Since switching to ADSL I now have higher pings and 10% - 95% packet loss when playing and as of this week I cannot play any more because the game update downloads keep stalling. :mad: :mad:
Is there some way for me to take my case (and that of all other SWG players using ADSL) to Telkom and attempt to get them to stop giving my packets such a low priority? :confused:
Click to expand...

Wow I Thought I Was Probably One of the Only 2 People that Plays SWG in this Country ... Well , I have Been Hunting For Broadband Solutions for a While and Nothing Really Seems to Be Sweeping me off my Feet ... Seem Like You Need Big $$ if You Want Something Worth While ... Sigh ..

I Currently Just use my Telkom ISDN (Sadly Which I Have Had Problems With as well) But So Far Seems to be my only Solution or Rather Option at The moment. I Play on the Lowca Server Which is Not European, The US Server is Much More Stable Pingwise than the US

On Lowca Server I Get About 340 - 420 Ping ... Which For now I Guess I Will Just Have to Settle With ... Such Is Life in SA.
 
As it turns out all the servers are in the states anyway. On a side note, over the last 2 weeks I have had fantastic performance on my line when connecting to the SWG servers and my updates have been coming down at the maximum speed of my line (384k). From Tuesday though things have been ****e again... But now I don't know whether its Telkom or the uber SOE who have gimped the game :confused:
 
We seem to be in the same boat, I have been playing SWG from from July last year and what I have started to notice that you will always have a bad ping with a huge amount of lost packets around the end of the month.

I usually find myself something els to do for that last 2 says of the months and the 1st 2 days of the month. It has however been getting worse in recent months and I have had problems 4 to 5 days into the month.

The obvious answer will prolly be that it is due to the 100's of people trying to get as much downloaded as possible from their accounts or becasue it's the new month they start on a new batch of downloads.

My average ping is also normally about 400-420 ingame with 0 loss of packets. I play on the Farstar (european) server.

I have stopped playing SWG for the time being and is waiting on the news on the CU + the new expansion to see if it will be going back.

Currently I am playing WOW, but from about Wednesday my ping has also gone to "sheize" as the monthend aproached.

I will be infront of my PS2 untill I can start playing properly again.

I am uber peefed about this but am unsure as to whom to direct my anger at!!

I simply cannot afford to spend as much as R 800.00 on a unshaped account especially as my gaming required less than 2gig of data per month.
Silly really!!
 
Ok, going home now. If you still want access, please phone me.

My number is 072 460 6371

Note, calls from "Private Numbers" will not be answered!

Thanks!
Doug
 
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