Halo 3 frustration :(

['Press Start']

Just rang tiscali and told them I was switching to O2. They turned around and offered me 8meg with free evening and weekend calls for ?9.99 a month! I was already paying them ?14.99 a month just for 2 meg.

I still took up the O2 offer because of the upload speed but anyone with Tiscali just ring em and tell them you have an O2 contract phone and you are going to switch to their ?7.50 8 meg unlimited offer. See if they will bump you up!

[babs]

If you want a poor analogy think of your connection as a road. Your 'speed' as advertised by the provider (256kb up in your case) is the number of lanes on the road. The more lanes, the more traffic you can get on it. The actual speed in terms of updates in games is based on latency, think of that as the speed the cars on the road are traveling. It might be very well having 10 lanes, but if traffics moving at 20mph it's not so great

The 'speed' of the connection is not an issue. The packets of data sent and received by the game are the same size for everyone, so theoretically as long as you have bandwidth enough for those then it's a level playing field from that point of view.

The difference comes in with the latency. Latency is the time it takes for a packet to get to the server (and bacK) and measured in milliseconds. In Halo it can make a difference depending on where the host is. If it's a host in this country, your connection to them is going to be in the realms of 50ms (approx), but if it's somewhere in the States you can expect to add 200-400 realistically. So if you're playing on a host in this country against an American on a 50Mbit connection, in theory you're still going to have the advantage 1v1 as your machine is getting the updates faster than his.

It's obviously not as cut-and-dried as that, but in a nutshell that's how it works.

[anephric]

Inevitably, if you're serious about getting the best out of your connection vis a vis latency, you'll need to find out a bit more about your ISP and what path you're on, i.e. interleaved or fast. Asking them to alter the max delay settings on your line can help reduce pings too, but this needs to be carefully traded off against the inevitable errors that will build up on your line with the minimum of max delay set to it.

For example, my pings to the US used to be about 400ms in an average game of CoD2, which was pretty unplayable, and since the only way I could get many games was by playing US hosts, I didn't have much alternative. After haranguing my ISP, I could get my pings down to <200ms to the US, which is as good as it's going to get. I just have to live with resetting the router more often. I probably should invest in a prefiltered master phone socket, but I can't be hacked.

['Press Start']

*Update*

I have now switched from Tiscali 2meg package which had a 1877 kps download, 258kps upload and 155ms ping to:
O2 standard 8 meg
Download 8978 kps
Upload 1002kps
Ping 55ms (www.speedtest.net/maidenhead)

Took Halo 3 on a 2 hours test run and killing people is easier now! a couple of games were laggy but then I chose 'best connection' and I was straight killing mutha f**kers! head shots with fast firing guns are finding their mark a hell of a lot more. Shields were dropping quicker with head shots too.

O2 mission statement is they want to give the user a pure broadband experience, without the Digital TV or telephone extras. Just pure quality connection. So if you have an o2 Mobile contract you can get the 8meg package for ?7.50 a month.

[MJ]

Welcome to the Halo 2 and 3 'matches are decided by connection' lottery.