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Soulreaver

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At what speed must your internet be 2 run WoW smoothly? and what is the minimal speed? Any people that have iBurst, please help - it looks like im getting iBurst
 
It's not the speed it's the latency. You can play WoW on a dial-up no problem. But you do need nice latency. I would say anything below 1k Latency is playable but around 400 is the best to play on.

I know of alot of people who plays on iBurst. Just make sure you don't suffer packet loss and you'll be ok ;)
 
sorry for the newbie questions, but what is latency and packet loss? i have heard that iBurst run at 50 megabites per second (Mbps). wil that be enough?
 
Your car has a clock that says 200,doesn't mean it'll get near that speed unless you are driving down a mountain ( read - flying )

Latency is the time it takes from when a signal is sent till a response is received. No use driving 200kph and having brakes that only respond after 2 seconds :)
 
Latency is time it takes for a bit of data to get from one place to another.
Think of it as the speed of your bike.
Bandwidth is how much data you can transfer simultaneously.
Think of it as the width of the road.

A hella fast bike on a clogged road, means the bike is throttled, or bottlenecked, waiting behind a taxi.

A wide, empty road but your driving a scooter means you can open that little vespa up, but it'll still only hit 27km/h.

The trick is getting sufficient bandwidth so that you aren't bottlenecked, and balancing that with a good line quality so that you can put the pedal to the metal. Getting a 4meg line for eg means nothing if your latency to a WoW server remains the same as some guy with a 384K. On the other hand, a 64K digicon or isdn will have fantastic pings with smaller data packets (less contention, same upload rate as download rate) but the narrowness of the pipe will mean massive slowdowns when theres a lot of data flying around (such as during a raid)
 
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iburst 50mbps? lol umm i think not.

ADSL i wont play with anything over 350
 
info

Soulreaver said:
sorry for the newbie questions, but what is latency and packet loss? i have heard that iBurst run at 50 megabites per second (Mbps). wil that be enough?
Click to expand...

no problem we all need to start somewhere hey :D

Latency is the ammount of time it takes for a packet (a tiny chucnk of data) to travel from your PC, to the server, and back again. So the lower the latency, the better. Imagine playing WoW with a latency of 5000 ms (5 sec) compared to 100 ms (0.1 sec)!!! Every time you click it will take 5 secs for a response!! LOWER THE BETTER!! :D

Packet loss is related to latency. When you suffer packet loss, sometimes these packets "get lost" and they dont make their way back to your PC. not good at all... generally speaking wireless suffers from this more than a fixed line circuit.

phew :eek:
 
Best is to do the following

go to run on your start up.

type cmd and press enter.

now type as is:

ping www.myadsl.co.za -n 20


See if you suffer any packet loss. Then replace the address i have there with the WoW-eu site address or IP for the server and you should have an idea of what you're in for.
 
Skurm said:
Latency is time it takes for a bit of data to get from one place to another.
Think of it as the speed of your bike.
Bandwidth is how much data you can transfer simultaneously.
Think of it as the width of the road.

A hella fast bike on a clogged road, means the bike is throttled, or bottlenecked, waiting behind a taxi.

A wide, empty road but your driving a scooter means you can open that little vespa up, but it'll still only hit 27km/h.

The trick is getting sufficient bandwidth so that you aren't bottlenecked, and balancing that with a good line quality so that you can put the pedal to the metal. Getting a 4meg line for eg means nothing if your latency to a WoW server remains the same as some guy with a 384K. On the other hand, a 64K digicon or isdn will have fantastic pings with smaller data packets (less contention, same upload rate as download rate) but the narrowness of the pipe will mean massive slowdowns when theres a lot of data flying around (such as during a raid)
Click to expand...

Transport analogies ftw
 
They're easier to understand by networking noobs like me.

As for packet loss, when a connection between two endpoints is very long and routes between a number of routers along the way, packets of data might just go 'missing', poof, into the void. When this happens, the sender of the packet will wait for a receipt acknowledgement, if he doesnt get one, he'll retransmit. It's easy to see how this is a bad thing. Packet loss means lag spikes, and lots of retransmission of duplicate data. Effectively, packet loss is bad for gaming. Very bad. Less so for downloading stuff. It is, in my experience, the single most contributing factor to a bad gaming connection. Wireless connections are notoriously 'lossy' due to the very nature of the radio wave transmissions they rely on and environmental influences (ever get static while listening to the radio? same thing). Wherever possible, avoid wireless. Find out from your ISP if they route any traffic wirelessly, or via sattelite. If so, find another ISP that doesn't.

Lastly, as for the original question : how much bandwidth is required, my own testing indicates that WoW needs somewhere between 128K to 256K (up and down) to function optimally. Anything more than this is pure overkill. Even a 64K line is fine for solo and small-group content. This is why a 384K ADSL line will probably work just as fine as a 4meg line. The only bonus that a 4meg line has over a 384K one is that it'll have a slightly faster transmit speed (keep in mind ADSL is asynchrnous - transmit and receive are two different values).

That said, if you raid with voice (Ventrilo/Teamspeak) a lot, a 384K might not cut it.
 
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P.S. if you have a 'lossy' connection, you may be able to tweak your tcpstack a bit to increase your TTL window, among others. Visit www.dslreports.com, run the Tweak Test there, then dl DrTCP from that site (or you can hack the registry manually) and make the changes that the test reccomends. Worked wonders for me. I was running through a VPN to bypass shaping (I firmly believe that even if your local connection is unshaped, there are shaped segements in your route to the WoW servers that your ISP/Telkom cannot guarantee won't exist. I went from 500-700ms on a supposedly unshaped line, down to 250-350ms...) that was timing out a lot and it was frustrating as heck, and after running the tests and tweaking my stack, disconnections are gone.
 
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So what you guys are trying 2 say is that 50mbps with 1/2G bandwidth aint going 2 cut it?
 
Soulreaver said:
So what you guys are trying 2 say is that 50mbps with 1/2G bandwidth aint going 2 cut it?
Click to expand...

Your understanding and assumptions on speed is a bit lacking :P

iBurst aint that fast - ever
Bandwidth doesn't mean crap for online gaming if it has too high latency

Latency is the difference between seeing a mob and clicking attack,then waiting two seconds,then suddenly you've lost 80% of your hp as you didnt see it spawn 5 other mobs beating you to a pulp

Fast top speed and lots of room on the hiway doesn't mean jack if your car takes 20minutes to go from 0-100
 
I've got friends in SA i chat to, using Iburst. For some it works fine, for others it's horrible. Depends on your packet loss. Run a ping test (pitbull demonstrated above) and see what your loss is.

Personally, I wouldn't go near any kind of wireless with a 10 foot pole.
 
Skurm said:
That said, if you raid with voice (Ventrilo/Teamspeak) a lot, a 384K might not cut it.
Click to expand...

I can confirm that it can indeed cut it. We run two accounts, same connection (unshaped 384k), 2 x vent and we sit with around 280 - 400ms on average. This includes 25man content as well.
 
Would wow by any chance run smoothly with a 50mbps iburst with 1G bandwidth on a private server? how much would the latency be and would it be any different than on the original server?
 
Iburst does not have a 50Mbps option, noone in this country does. Most of us use 0.5Mbps connection. 1Gig of bandwidth refers to the amount of data you can download for 1 month. If you're just going to play Wow and check some email and browse the net then it will be fine. If you're going to download movies/music or check sites like utube etc then it will not be enough.
private server? You mean illegal server? Fail.
 
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