The future of Online Gaming?

[SAS]

With games like Quake3 Causing modem players so much hassle, what will future games hold? Will we all have to go digital and get ISDN/cable/ADSL? If so that will mean only the people who can offer those types of connections will survive. Most people are on a budget, and thanks to BT they won't be able to afford ADSL or even ISDN. Will that mean less gamers?

In the near future with people having to buy digital connections to play games online will the ease of pick up and play be over? It will not be a case of someone trying out a game online anymore because they will need to get a digital connection first. Unlike in the past where most gamers would have tried out online gaming first hand on a modem and then gone digital?

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Posted by S.A.S
www.barrysworld.com/guides

 

[old.frankie]

S.A.S M8, u on a digi connection ?

i have had my fair share of modem play, i hate it now, no matter what Q3 server i go on, its always dominated by LPB's, and im at a total loss to play. With Q2 i could judge times and hit lpb's good, and it was more even, with Q3 its different, even though you see your shot hit the LPB nothing happens, You know you hit them good, Yet nothing happens, this makes it VERY difficult and VERY frustrating. I know i cant afford ISDN, over 40 quid a month for a dial up connection is way wrong, when u think of the cost it takes BT to run that connection it makes you feel sick. And when you are a student, with no job, then things become difficult. If i were working and getting a good 100 quid a week, then things would be different, and many other people would prolly have digi connections. If any of you want to feel sick, and cry then all you have to do is read on.

Cable connections in the US are as common as coke in shops, and as affordable. It's common to have cable I-NET acces for around 15 quid a month, and depending where you are and what service you have, you could have a ping time of <50 with No P/L, but this is all dependant.

By now i should think you feel sick. Goto the bathroom.

Then again, theres this new thing from CISCO systems, and valve software called powerplay or somthing, which supposidly makes modems act as good as digi connections.

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DR_FRANKENSTIEN




[This message has been edited by frankie (edited 23 January 2000).]

 

[old.LoJiK]

I have nothing but sympathy for you modem users, I honestly don't know how you can put up with what must be unplayable lag? I myself have ISDN but even with that find most games pretty rough :-( ok I doubt many of you will feel too sorry for me, but my ping is rarely below 100 (unless im standing on my own not moving) and when the plasma ammo starts flying and more than one or two people are onscreen, well everything just comes grinding to a halt. From Gamespy the servers (BW ones) return 50ms pings, in game it fluctuates wildly up to nearly 200 :-(( and packet loss is bad too. Im using the Nildram dial up and have found this to be an excellent ISP for all other online games. I guess Q3 really is intended for use with broadband technologies such as Cable and DSL which is commonplace in the US, and I feel until it becomes commonplace over here too us Brits are not going to be able to enjoy the game online to its fullest.

 

[old.buckleb]

The future for modemers?

I'm afraid there is no future, at least not for online gaming.

I recently switched to ISDN, after years of using a modem, and find the Q3 experience a little more satisfying. I still experience that weird 'half a step behind everyone else' phenomenen, but it's not as bad as with a modem.

The peeps with ISDN, are now becoming the 'new' HPBs. With xDSL and cable being used extensively (moreso in Europe I think).

The 'old' HPBs (UltraHPBs?)will be forced to upgrade, or log off. It's not a nice thought, but I fear that's what is going to happen. I guarantee that modemers will not be able to even connect Quake4 with less than ISDN.

In a way this was all inevitable. PC users have been forced to upgrade every part of their system over the years, to keep up with the ever increasing 'features' that new software brings with it. I guess it's now the turn of the communications system. Broadand access seems to be relatively common in the US and Europe right now, and that's the market Game developers aim for.

Why we don't have cheap broadband access, is another issue, but simply it's OFTEL+BT=No_Progress.



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Playing as SoWat!

 

[old.Necro]

I think that those who want to play highend league play (ie SAS/CiX/QPD/Denial/etc level) will be required (if not already) to get ISDN, although this has much to do with more clans kitting themselves out with serious hardware - the average system in my clan is something like a P500 with ISDN card..

Anyway, if i find my Pace Internal 56k a pain as a form of connection, i dread to imagine what other people are finding it like..

I think modems are still going to account for the plurality (if not the majority) of gamers though. Proper broadband is a long way away in this country (unless you happen to live somewhere like Hull or one of the more affluent areas of London), and i think it is going to stay that way for a long time. The UK doesn't have any real competition (as in the US). Heck, even France Telecom (a NATIONALISED corporation) has got a better situation as far as users are concerned..

 

[old.TheGuyver]

At a lan i can hold my own in q3.

The last lan we played about 7 games straight in a FFA, i won/came top in 5 of them. 1 of them i didnt know the map and the other i joined in half way thru. (i do have the logs and stats btw )

The Mega game just gone was almost impossible to play. i had a 500 + ping, no matter what isp i connected to. That said i still did a lot of damage, and i think i did myself justice given the circumstances.

The reason i quit (partly cause it was an old quake map with the same old quake problems... oooo look i died, respawn (1/2 second later) oooo look i died, respawn (1/2 second later) etc etc its not the game simply the maps)

Btw on all the other maps i have played, even the converted q2dm1 and the Ra2 Maps i always live for AT LEAST 3 seconds.

That aside (sorry lost the plot there) the other reason i quit was the fact someone had a 50 odd ping. I knew when i was about to be killed by this person cause as soon as i went new him, or he was around the corner my screen would jump about 6 frames to my death. I dont even see him come round the corner.

At least in q2 u see a little bit and have a small, significant hope in hell of evading.

Now label me a bitchy winer all u like, but im not saying all lpbs are wankers. or that your connection won not you, becaue u are rite u DO need the skill. as i said before on a lan i have no problems whatso ever. On the net it is a very very hard slog for a modemer. We spend all this money on hardware and telephone calls etc and we are feeling we do not get our moneys worth.

Also arguably a medium skilled LPB player can beat a medium or good HPB player. Someone did a reaction time thing.

Like 2 people come face to face each with a shotgun... if both of them hit the fire button in the same instant the LPB would win. Simply because his information gets to the server and back quicker.

No wonder some of us look like crap when it comes to these things, when all it boils down to is the lack of a decent connection.

please please please can there be a hpb only server next mega game? that way hpbs have nothing to complain about except thier own skill.

 

[old.Ewan]

Im pretty sure i remember the week after Q3 came out, John Carmack putting in his plan that hed just played q3 on a modem for the 1st time.

Now, if my memory is correct, then did modemers ever stand a chance of the game being balanced towards them - if you design a game testing it purely on a lan, youre going to end up with a game playable purely on a lan or a broadband connect.

I love the way Q3 was meant to be for everyone, but in fact requires at least 3x the machine spec of the average AOL user to play, and a <100ms ping.

Ewan

 

[old.venturer01]

copied from post above
"Im pretty sure i remember the week after Q3 came out, John Carmack putting in his plan that hed just played q3 on a modem for the 1st time".
i think you are correct
and on a 28k modem , will have to look back through bw news
think i said to myself f***in pish when i saw it

[This message has been edited by venturer01 (edited 24 January 2000).]

 

[old.Necro]

Quake, IME, tends to have crap netcode until at least 2 months after initial release. I think the Q3 code will improve, but it may well be a drawn out process. Q3 will never compare to QW though..

 

[old.Damned]

I play Q3ctf with a 28.8 (nothing else available; but cable and dsl coming soon ) and you folks are right, q3 is a lot harder than q2. I play with a ping that starts at 300 and pretty much sits at 450-550 most of the time, q2 was 50-100 less. But I play q3 a lot and get my share of the frags, although sometimes the lpbs are just too good and I have no chance. Here in the states everyone is pinging 40-70; I am usually the only one over 150. Most lpbs see me and immediately switch to the pummel for humiliation but I am not that hopeless and generally kill 4 pummellers out of every 5 humiliation attempts, so a few easy frags come my way (and a good laugh for both). The plasma gun is the worst, freezing me with the first blob and I am dead. If a hpb takes a different approach to the game and keeps his/her expectations within the parameters of his/her ping and plays a hpb strategy, then you can have an enjoyable game, get some kills and help the team; although I find my score does not accurately reflect the work I do for my team, due to the difficulty in finishing someone off after hurting them badly by losing them in corridors, or having a teammate finish him off first. I wrote a piece on HPB tactics a while back, Anyone interested? I could post it in summary form or send you the whole thing.

 

[old.frankie]

hey, a US person

hi there, how is it over there ?

Just wondering, what is the average type of connection over there ?, DSL, CABLE ?

and what sort of costs are those connections per month ?

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DR_FRANKENSTIEN

 

[old.frankie]

hi.

i make it so that gamespy does'nt touch the network settings at all, its all done in the autoexec.cfg. About Cable and DSL prices in the US> those kind of prices are what i thought it would be, you are talking 15 - 20 quid for a cable connection. That is a lot better than anything we can have. As for DSL im not sure, is it true that demon internet is doing ADSL for 35 quid INC.VAT ?. if so thats comarable to the prices in the US.

About modemers. I played the BW megagame last night, and obviosly it was unplayable, it was a laff, But there was NO WAY you could home in on a specific target with a 700 ping, which is what you get on a modem with 40 players, the only thing you can do is run around like a dememted chicked, with no head, shotting constantly. As i said it was a laff, but not any sort of seriosness at all.

Recently i have been playing q3 a lot, and have become acustomed to the way it predicts LAG, and ping, and this has helped me. I can now be in the same list to the LPB's. What im really saying overall is that if you are on a 56k modem trying to play q3, you need a lot more skill to play aganst LPB's than you do if you were an LPB playing LPB's or a HPB playing HPB's.

sorry about the spelling, kinda in a rush.



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DR_FRANKENSTIEN

 

[old.Damned]

Hey Frankie. Cable and DSL are spreading like wildfire over here. I live on an island and even we should have both options by the year end. I would say all big cities are covered and most of the smaller ones. Cable is about 30-45$/month including modem rental, installation is often free. DSL is more mebe 60$ or so a mnth and you have to spend 150-200$ on the dsl modem and 50$ or so installation. I am sure competition from cable will force the dsl guys to lower the charges. There are very few modem players around anymore. Makes it really hard to compete and have fun with your dial up.

 

[old.Dr_Grey]

Ok...I'm probably gonna rock the boat with this post, but here's my 2 penneth worth.

Firstly I am a LPBer, and it's obvious that ping is a major factor in the game, no one is arguing that. I won't argue that I have an advantage when it comes to online play against modemers.

Secondly, it's also down the people like BW and UKCCL to have like they currently do a mixed league (UKCCL has one, I don't think BW has) which makes the it easier for good HPWs to compete. E.g. 1 HPW in a match with 7 LPBs is just not fair, but when there is a minimum of 2 HPWs per side, it doesnt seem so bad, and also it means you maybe have to be more strategic about player positioning in a match. The thing that worries me is the assumption by many of the establishments like BW that we can have unrestricted leagues, which seems to me to be more because all the people running them and their clans are LPB dominated (no offense meant, our clan is too), and seem to forget about the HPW clans. At the moment when recruiting players into clans, HPWs aren't even getting a look in, just because most of the leagues are looking to be unrestricted ping. This is the only way to make it fairer.

On a slightly different note, I have heard a lot of HPWs complain about their online play in Q3. To try and see what online play was like, I've plugged my modem in and played Q3.
First impressions were a bit sluggish but ok, then I tweaked it a bit. Set snaps to 20, rate to 4500, timenudge to 40, maxpackets to 20. This seemed to help, and so far when I have played on a modem, I have never been beat by a HPW (don't get me wrong theres plenty of HPWs who can beat me...just when Ive played online recently) and often beaten a few LPBs in the process. The thing I like the most now is that Q3 is not tied to framerate, so I can still set my com_maxfps to what I want on a modem unlike Q2, which gave LPWs an even bigger advantage in that game.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm a reasonable player, but not that good, so why is this when I'm not even used to the lag anymore?
I know one HPW who will probably beat 80% of good LPBers, so whats up with the rest? Also I tried going back to a modem on Q2, and tbh I found it more unplayable than Q3, and couldn't even last more than one match.
My crap theory is, that Q3 is pretty new, and that HPWs have more skills to learn in terms of leading with your firing (it ain't the same lead as Q2, and LPBers dont need to lead as much is what I mean). Also because its a new technology leap, modemers who are less likely to be able to afford the newest 3d cards etc have more of a framerate problem, making it harder. BUT, for me it's certainly well playable as long as the competition is not all LPWs, which is the way BW etc are leading it. This is what needs to be stopped to provide a good future for modem playing. Provide mixed ping leagues please guys. The UKCCL sign up if just about the same for the mixed ping league as the unrestricted league, so there is definitely the call for it.

 

[old.Dr_Grey]

Also...if u use gamespy 2.18 make sure u check the following as gamespy overrides your rate in your config or autoexec...

If your settings are reverting back to 28k each time you go to a server, make sure of your gamespy settings assuming u are using it.
In 'Tools' -> 'Options' (in gamespy) there is a specific rate option for Quake3 that isnt in the games settings in the normal section. The default for this is 28.8k and a lot of people dont realise this exists and get high pings each time. Make sure you set this to the correct figure and some of the probs should go away. (not all by a long shot

)

 

[old.Dr_Grey]

Hmm as far as I'm aware there is no way to bypass the Gamespy rate setting in 2.18. It overrides the Q3 Autoexec...?

On the other matter, its obvious u need more skill to compete against LPBs when HPW, but this has always been the case really just as much so in Q2 imo. Now the only real issue is ping response, and not graphics framerate anymore. WHich for me was always a real handicap in Q2.

 

[old.TheGuyver]

Ah but the point i was trying to make was that the divide between lpb and hpb is bigger in q3 than in q2!

Im not a brill player, but i can hold my own on the same connection!

 

[old.Dr_Grey]

Yup hehe, I get the point, but my point is, now that your framerate is no longer tied to your modem rate so you dont have to cap maxfps, so that is no longer an advantage, why is the gap even bigger? I know there is still the latency factor, but that was there as well as the framerate factor in Q2.

 

[old.TheGuyver]

belive me if i knew why i wouldnt be here. Im not saying the quality of play on the modem is worse, in fact i can still have a fairly decent game with a ping of 400. On q2 that would be impossible. Also does anyone know what the ping ratio from q2 to q3 is? i.e 2:1 ?

so that a 400 ping in q3 is the same as a 200 ping in q2?

I have Dual V2`s (canopus`s) and q3 is OK. Not brilliant but ok. there is something else about q3 that is different. it feels funny to play...

Dunno why. Anyhows. As you said before, the graphics part is no longer an issue, except that if you use a better system, you get a better quality of play, but thats the same on any game.

Maybe not so good graphics and crap connection doesnt help, and adds the whole picture.

So it must be down to shear connection, and the stability of it. and the fact that ppl on isdn etc simply send the data to the server quicker than the poor hpb.

 

[old.buckleb]

>>So it must be down to shear connection, and the stability of it. and the fact that ppl on isdn etc simply send the data to the server quicker than the poor hpb.<<

I think that's probably it. Even with Home Highway, I still experience that curious 'half a step behind the Ultra LPB' thing. I expect it's the same for modem users v ISDN.

Some kind of server side prediction must play a part, and I think it plays a bigger part in Q3 (not just the items pickup prediction). For instance, someone fires a rocket at me, and at the last moment I dodge (and see it go over my shoulder), but a split second later I'm dead. The server probably predicted that I couldn't get out of the way. Or, I find myself running into the path of a rocket, reverse direction and BOOM, I'm dead. The server probably predicted that I was going to get hit.

Maybe it's because missile tracking (by that I mean any weapon's missile), seems to be updated far quicker than individual player movements, that the HPW is at a, relatively, greater disadvantage. They just can't update the server, quickly enough, as to their movements (trying to frag a nimble ULPB is *very* hard).

It all points to the fact that Quake3 looks to have been designed for xDSL/Cable/LAN play, rather than modem/ISDN.

Still, in the right company, it's lots of fun. Participating in a good-natured game is a pleasure. Being involved in a game where you are getting absolutely slaughtered by non-speaking ULPBs is not.


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Playing as SoWat!

 

[old.TheGuyver]

AH! hadnt thought about the server predict stuff....

Well speaking of lans and all....
*Pimping Mode ON*

Ill be going to I3 in swindon on the 24th-26th (friday-Sunday)

www.multiplay.co.uk

*Pimping Mode Off*

[This message has been edited by TheGuyver (edited 01 February 2000).]

 

[old.LoJiK]

DR_Grey you are my hero hehe.. I have an ISDN Connection and have always played Quake 3 online through Gamespy.. to say I have suffered lag would be an understatement, I was very disappointed, but your little tip about Gamespy has turned Q3 into a whole new game for me. I have GS 2.19 and sure enough when i looked at "Tools/Options" my rate was capped at 2500!! arghhh a quick adjustment to 6000 and I can barely believe the difference. The lightning actually attaches to the end of the lightning gun!?!?!? did anyone else know that? ;-)you all better watch out now coz ill be getting 2 frags a round now instead of 1 ;-P

 

[old.Dr_Grey]

Hehe, glad to be of help, that Gamespy bugged me for ages, and I'd been playing with a rate of 2500 for about a month b4 I realised it was ignoring the autoexec and using its own. I didnt think they would still have it in 2.19 tho...

 

[old.alt]

the future of gamine, online? - well, if we want more functionality flying across our little lines, then I reckon modemers (me) are simply gonna have to get ourselves fatter connections. And I reckon Carmack + co should be praised for writing stuff for tomorrows hardware, both in terms of graphics and connection speed. What do ppl want anyway? If a game is written for a 28.8 connection, who buys it? - I play on a v90 and get decent 130-250 pings thru demon or wireplay no probs.

Anyway, gimme fat bandwidth. People who can't afford it are either gonna a) get better jobs or b) not play

not nice, but thats all I can see.

 

[old.Necro]

As much as its a nasty thing to say, your right basically. However, in the case of broadband, the real problem is availability..