Bandwidth Use In MMOs

Massively is running a story about bandwidth costs for MMOs and other virtual worlds. It's based on a post at the BBC on the same subject which references a traffic analysis (PDF) done for World of Warcraft. Quoting: "If you're an average user on capped access, the odds are you have roughly 20Gbytes per month to allocate among all of your Internet usage (it varies depending on just where you are). For you, sucking back (for example) a 2GB World of Warcraft patch isn't something you can just do. It's something you have to plan for — and quite often you have to plan for in the following month. Even a 500MB download has to be handled with caution. MMOGs as a rule don't use a whole lot of bandwidth in actual operation. However, the quantity definitely rises in busy areas with lots of players, where there are large numbers of mobs, or on raids, and takes quite a much larger jump if you're using voice as well."

Comments

Offline patches?

[Tubal-Cain]

Can't you get offline installers that you can download from school/work/friend's basement and bring over by sneakernet?

Re:Offline patches?

[Broken scope]

WoW and Eve offered standalone ones owing to the fact that autoupdate's don't always work correctly.

Re:Offline patches?

[Anonymous Coward]

There are standalone patches available.
http://www.strategyinformer.com/pc/patches/worldofwarcraft/patch.html

Re:Offline patches?

[RogueyWon]

Stand-alone download installers for WoW patches are indeed available, albeit not always easily so. Certainly, Fileplanet makes them available, but with heavy priority for subscribers. That said, there's often a bit of a wait for the stand-alone downloads to appear, particularly for the non-US versions.

The best piece of advice that I can give about getting WoW patches is to not use the Blizzard torrent client to get it. Let the update start using the default client, then cancel it immediately. You can then grab the .torrent file from a temporary directory within your WoW folder and feed it to a "proper" bittorrent client, which has actual connection configuration options. The default client likes to max out my upstream (and can't be disuaded from doing so easily), with the result that my connection become near-unusable and my downstream speed suffers horribly. By using a proper client and capping the upstream 10k/sec below maximum (which still allows for a decent upload speed and maintains my status as a good citizen), I was able to achieve almost 10 times the download speed I was getting from the official client (going from 60k/sec to 550k/sec), while also keeping my connection vaguely usable for other things.

On an unrelated note, Blizzard are absolutely horrible at rolling out patches. I used to be a hardcore Final Fantasy XI player and since then I've had short bursts in Lord of the Rings Online. FFXI patch-day bugs would be things like "some obscure fight in the Den of Rancor which nobody's done for weeks now has a bit of a pathing-bug, which we'll fix overnight". LotRO patch day was a bit bumpier, but that's understandable given it was a new game at the time and even then, stuff was fixed quite quickly. Any major patch from Blizzard effectively means at least a week (sometimes more) of seriously disrupted play, through server instability and massively disruptive bugs. The most recent patch has resulted in innumerable server crashes and restarts, severe intermittent latency issues throughout the evenings, disconnects when zoning in and out of instances, and a number of graphical bugs affecting machines with SLI graphics cards (albeit bugs with workarounds). The previous patch (2.4) effectively made Heroic instances unplayable for a week, along with the usual latency and disconnection problems. All of this is despite Blizzard having one of the longest and most public testing cycles in the industry for new patches, via the PTR (test realm).

Re:Offline patches?

[Bert64]

And so we return to metered access, where people have to watch the download meter instead of the clock to ensure they don't face a ridiculously hefty bill.
And an angry kid with a ddos botnet can not only kill your connection, but also cost you a lot of money, get you disconnected for non payment and give you a bad credit rating.

Also in the UK it's not the network that needs upgrading, it's the ridiculous prices BT charge for bandwidth on wholesale ADSL.

Re:Offline patches?

[Bloodoflethe]

Let's change "Users are gradually switching to legal methods to watch their favorite TV shows." to "Users are finally being offered legal means to watch their favorite TV shows online without paying or paying too much."

Re:Offline patches?

[Cryophallion]

No, TOLKIEN Rings.

And please see the story on Ars Geeks are Not Comic Book Guy

Re:Offline patches?

[theaveng]

Yeah that works too.

What concerns me is how Comcast Cable responded to the growing "legal video streaming" phenomenon. If you're trying to watch Heroes on NBC.com, and they determine you are streaming too much data, they can temporarily-limit your access to 192kbit/s. Although some video sites like CWTV.com will operate as low as 128k, NBC's site requires at least 512k.

Your Heroes video will be effectively cutoff from viewing. That's anti-competitive; it's Comcast trying to force their users to watch Heroes on cable, rather than internet. It's comcast trying to protect their older business from NBC's new internet-based business.

Re:Offline patches?

[Taevin]

I... I'm not sure what to say. Telcos do not have a history of "serving their customers extremely well," quite the opposite. The only thing they have a history of is monopolizing the market to rape customers for as much as possible. The US is the in the bandwidth dark ages compared to other first-world countries. In countries in Asia and Europe, ISPs offer full 100Mbps connections for less than we pay for crappy DSL in the US.

The fiber that is just now being rolled out? It was supposed to be everywhere by 2000, over eight years ago. The government gave the telcos $200 billion to build out this network, and they just pocketed the money without doing a thing. Read (for example, there are many, many articles about this; google "$200 billion" and any term related you can think of like teclos, fiber, etc.) this.

Oh, and that fiber they're rolling out now? It's only in very limited amounts to very high wealth areas and new high wealth developments. The rest of us will be stuck on our intermittent and slow connections for many years.

Imagine...

[Tempest451]

How good MMOs could be if bandwidth wasn't an issue?

Re:Imagine...

[TubeSteak]

Imagine how good MMOs could be if [storage space/cpu power/graphics cards/ram] wasn't an issue?

Putting everyone on a 1Gb link isn't going to magically make MMOs better.

Get an ISP that doesn't suck.

[SanityInAnarchy]

If an ISP has you capped at 20 gigs a month, switch.

Unfortunately, that may not be an option, depending on where you live...

It's my hope that things like MMOs, voice communication (and videoconferencing), YouTube, etc, will all drive ordinary users to use more bandwidth. Hopefully a lot more.

And that these applications will appear too fast and too varied for the ISPs to attempt to make deals with them.

This would force ISPs to stop focusing on bandwidth leeches (and specifically targeting BitTorrent), and actually start increasing their bandwidth to match the very real demand.

I could be entirely wrong, though. All of the above rests on the assumption that MMO companies ultimately have more power than ISPs.

Transfer Caps

[Broken scope]

This doesn't seem to be an issue of bandwidth, but of transfer caps. Unless bandwidth refers to both caps and connection speeds.

Re:WTH?

[lysergic.acid]

if you have a business connection then you might have access to uncapped internet access in the U.S., but otherwise most residential broadband services are capped--even if the ISP doesn't tell you.

when it's standard practice to oversell to the point that your total network capacity is only enough for 1% of your customers, then of course bandwidth caps are going to be put in place. there's no way that Verizon, Comcast, or any other major U.S. ISP can handle even a quarter of their subscribers using their service plan's full advertised transfer rate 24/7.

with bandwidth throttling & packet shaping, i'm only getting about 50~60 GB total downstream throughput per month (if there are no major outages). and we're charged about 1000% the bandwidth costs (per Mbps) of countries like Sweden, Japan, Korea, etc.