MWEB Gaming Feedback

Hi Will, great to see you're still so active on this. Just a quick question, with a 4 meg uncapped line and service, what kind of latency should I be expecting on average to US east coast and western europe game servers respectively. Thanks very much, Raoul.
 
Will@MWEB said:
Just a little fyi for Friday. Our Bad Company 2 servers are operational as of last night. :) We have 4 32 player servers up, 1 x Rush and 1 x Conquest in Cape Town and JHB so Bad Company players please join us for some games tonight. We will be setting up a base camp on the GameZone Forums for this so please keep your questions / discussions regarding server related issues in that space.
Click to expand...

AWESOME!! :D
 
Raedwulf said:
Hi Will, great to see you're still so active on this. Just a quick question, with a 4 meg uncapped line and service, what kind of latency should I be expecting on average to US east coast and western europe game servers respectively. Thanks very much, Raoul.
Click to expand...

I'll answer that question if you can tell me the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow :D

Seriously it's extremely hard to ballpark numbers like that. What games are we talking about, where are you situated on our network, what sort of base latency are you getting on your Telkom line onto our network?

If you give me some example servers we can supply you with some test pings.
 
BFBC2 servers is still deserted :( As is the Gamezone forums.... I can't even see any announcement on the GameZone forums... :(
 
Will@MWEB said:
It's a completely different environment hambone, XBOX and PC players don't join the same servers and Xbox multi player is exclusive to the Xbox Live servers, no-one else can host servers for those games.
Click to expand...

Oh, hectic. That's pretty k#k... so, on my XBOX I'm always using the xbox live server, and therefore the latencies are of the international flavor correct?
 
Steam issues

Hi Will

Ive been an Mweb customer since the uncapped option was made available. Since then i have had mixed results in terms of gaming. At the moment im still currently experiencing huge issues with steam and have been for the last 5 months or so. I can now connect to steam and update games (a couple months ago my steam account would not even login) however i cannot find any servers to play on. I refresh for instance counterstrike source and find zero results. When i manually enter in server ips and try connect it fails. I also get dropped from Call of Duty - BO and BFBC2(cant connect to EA servers on startup). Other issues are with Starcraft 2 as i get dropped from games occassionally.

I live in Rondebosch and have no issues with afrihost account. As soon as i dialup i can connect to all games no problem. It seems i only have an issue with Mweb isp.

Please may i get some feedback on these issues.
 
Will@MWEB said:
I'll answer that question if you can tell me the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow :D

Seriously it's extremely hard to ballpark numbers like that. What games are we talking about, where are you situated on our network, what sort of base latency are you getting on your Telkom line onto our network?

If you give me some example servers we can supply you with some test pings.
Click to expand...

I typed out a full and detailed response for this and when I posted it just vanished lol. So here we go again.

I had a issue with my pings, local at over 500, uk over 600, us over 700 and korea over 1000. I disconnected all the pcs from my network except my own, and removed all unnecessary processes, restarted and it turned around completely. Added back all pcs and processes and it still worked, so I have no idea what was wrong there. Oddly after I cleared everything off, and I ran my first test after restart, my local was still up over 350, but when I came back to it after 2 or 3 more tests it dropped down, despite the fact nothing had changed.

My current numbers are Cape - 12 ms, no packet loss, 1 ms jitter. Milton Keynes in UK - 165 ms, no packet loss, 1 ms jitter. Washington DC - 244 ms, no packet loss, 1-2ms jitters. Seoul, S Korea - 485 ms, no packet loss, 7-9 ms jitter.

These numbers are all from pingtest.net.

Specific games we're playing include League of Legends US (ping from around 300 on a good day, 400-500 average, spiking up near 1000.), WoW US (350, spiking to around 600), and Uncharted Waters Online, which does not provide proper latency numbers, instead settling on a spinning colour coded ring.

My question is are these numbers about standard for Cape Town, or even just South Africa in general? Or is there room for improvement?

For the most part I'm quite satisfied, with the exception of that last game, Uncharted Waters, which is giving me a real issue. Servers are located in Seoul, and after some effort, I have found this to be their IP. 121.78.238.151
I ran winmtr on that, and found quite a few reasons for my poor game performance.

The route taken include 30 hops which go from Cape Town, via the UK and then via the US, starting at the US west coast, jumping along a few stops to the east coast, doubling back to the middle, and then back east and finally on to Korea via the pacific.
The lowest the ping goes is 450 ms, averaging between there and 500, but bounced up as far as 800 or 1000 occasionally. I have also noted that packet loss goes as high as 5%. Back on pingtest, I also experienced a few runs where I could not even get a test on Seoul as no packets came back at all. Jitter has jumped as high as 50 ms.

Any way you look at it, the game is unplayable, lag spikes are vicious, and disconnects are very frequent.

So to summarize, are my numbers about on par with everyone else? Is there anything I can do to improve my difficulties with reaching that Seoul server?
Finally I also wanted to ask if I would get better latency results if I bumped up to the 10 meg service? Or would the 4 meg uncapped be the better options?

Thanks,
Raoul
 
Not sure if this is the right place to post, just switched to uncapped...

Just got my mweb uncapped 4meg and I'm running into quite a few issues, the main one being that steam almost always refuses to open, takes me about half an hour to connect. Also xfire dropps connecting every from every 10 seconds to 2 minutes.

I know the problem is not my line, as I was running a telkom based account just before my mweb kicked in and was succesfully recieving full and stable 10 meg line speeds. I have a dlink DSL-2500U if it's any help

Any Ideas?
 
BurNThaM said:
Just got my mweb uncapped 4meg and I'm running into quite a few issues, the main one being that steam almost always refuses to open, takes me about half an hour to connect. Also xfire dropps connecting every from every 10 seconds to 2 minutes.

I know the problem is not my line, as I was running a telkom based account just before my mweb kicked in and was succesfully recieving full and stable 10 meg line speeds. I have a dlink DSL-2500U if it's any help

Any Ideas?
Click to expand...

Reset router? My xfire never disconnects.
 
I have tried resetting router, disabling firewalls, etc

there are 3 people (including me) that are on my network, all of us experience the same problems, and only with the mweb account?
 
not too worried about whats using bw atm, I'm having the same issues on my laptop as well ( with xfire) (not with ping)

any other ideas?
 
I have 4 meg uncapped with a network that includes two switches and 10 computers, with another two or three added on a regular basis for short periods. We use quite a bit of bandwidth and xfire never disconnects. Run pingtest.net and post result from a few main areas, like your own city, milton keynes or maidenhead in the uk, and washington DC in the US. Post results of ping, packet loss and jitter. Also if you know how to get into your router interface, check the line attenuation.
 
There was a time in WoW - prior to patch 4.0.1 - when my wife and I, on our 385kb line, could raid together with no problems. 10 man raids were fine, but 25 man raids were problematic and dc'ing probable.

Tonight my guild went back to ICC and we were unable to play without DCing continually. Leatrix and TCPOptimizer in place to make up for the terrible latency that MWeb now provides in the game world nowadays.

It appears that after 5 months MWeb is significantly worse off than it was - I was very happy with the service I received back then. In 5 months the technicians at MWeb have come up with NOTHING to get me back to the level of gaming I enjoyed back then.

Is the technology beyond MWeb's techs? Or have they just not bothered to address the issue? Will this ever be adressed or is it something we have to learn to live with? Is the only option to change to another ISP which NEVER seems to suffer from these latency issues?
 
WGS2010, I am unfortunately in the same boat as you. I have a 384k line and used to do 25man raids every week almost no problems (the trash before marrogar sometimes made me DC). Now I cant raid properly in cata 25mans because I DC very frequently. It seems that it is not Mweb's fault, but Blizzard's. In this thread there is a post about what Blizzard considers broadband, and that seems to be 4meg down, 1meg up. Bummer, I know. Will@Mweb has been very helpful though in making our latency as low as possible, and when questing and doing dungeons that help can clearly be noticed, but unfortunately he can to nothing about the bandwidth requirements for 25man raiding.

I have however read that a few people with 384k lines have had good results with using a proxy and WoW, and while I didn't want to use it in the past, I have finally given in and decided to give it a try. Haven't really raided this week, so come Wednesday I should be able to say if it has worked or not. I am using BattlePing as my proxy by the way.

On another note: Is there anyone else doing 25man Cata raids on a 384k line with a proxy that can give more details regarding your experience with it latency and DC wise? Also, Will@Mweb, is there any difference in the priority of wow traffic via proxy VS via normal connection?
 
I'm using NO proxy whatsoever on a 384 line (with my bro playing aswell sometimes) and raiding 25mans. No issues for me everything runs smoothly. However there are some things you can do to make it better

1. Put off your combatlog
2. If you use recount type /recount sync to disable the feedback thingy it gives to other recount clients in the group.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X