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MMORPGs on Hughesnet (Satellite)
trancejeremy
Member UncommonPosts: 1,222
I live in a rural area, and my only two choices for broadband are Verizon 3G wireless and Satellite (Hughesnet though a neighbor had another provider he hates, Blue Sky)
Right now I have Verizon 3G but am probably not going to renew when my contract ends at the end of the year. Mostly because right now I have unlimited, but that plan seems to have ended, and instead of speed capping you once you go past 5 gigs a month, they charge you a quarter every megabyte.
So basically if I even went 200 megabytes over the limit a month, that would almost double my bill. And if I weren't careful (5 gigs is really not a lot at broadband speeds), I could have a bill of thousands (I've read and heard stories).
And beyond that, the service with Verizon is just terrible. The first 6 months it worked brilliant, but ever since it's sporadic, sometimes (like right now) I'm lucky to stay online for more than 15 minutes without being disconnected. And if you call to get help, they either read something off a sheet about how to make a network connection, or simply say you aren't in the service area (which contradicts their website and the flyer they sent me which caused me to sign up...)
Since it's Satellite based, clearly Hughesnet is not good for action gaming. But how about MMORPGs? My ping isn't exactly good on wireless, either, is it that much worse on Satellite? The games I play are LOTRO , Atlantica and Sword of the New World (not so much any more). Has anyone even tried it?
R.I.P. City of Heroes and my 17 characters there
Comments
I used to have hughsnet when I played SWG. My ping was always over 1000..sometimes nearing 3000.
It pretty much sucked...I'm so glad I have DSL now.
Hmmm, that's actually not bad. On a good day with Verizon Wireless, I get a ping of about 2000 ms. On a bad day it's close to 4000. (Well, on a bad day I can't connect)
R.I.P. City of Heroes and my 17 characters there
It will not be the best. They pack all your data together in huge bunches then send it meaning you'll get a high ping even in perfect conditions. So something that isn't bandwidth intensive like the actualy playing of a normal MMO is slower, while something a little more intesnive like web browsing or videos are just fine.
8GB is such a small amount of data that they brag about how many E-mails you can send(not intense) and forget to mention that it's less than 6 hours of youtube time(don't quote me that's from memory).
I find it amazing that by 2020 first world countries will be competing to get immigrants.
Any online gaming over satellite will be lagged to hell and back - for games, especially MMOs which generally work just fine with 200ms or so, you're much better off using dial-up. Especially with Hughes, their consumer level plans are beyond terrible - especially in the US, though I have had generally positive experiences with their low-level business plans, if you don't mind spending two hundred bucks a month for a DSL-quality connection.
www.wildblue.com
MAGA
As others have said, satellite guarantees terrible ping times. If that's your only option, you might want to look into dialup as a serious alternative for gaming. I'm not sure if 56k dialup would actually be better, but it might depend on the game.
A very high ping time is a bigger problem in some games than others. In something like Guild Wars, where reflexes matter, the game would be pretty much unplayable. In a turn-based game like Wizard101, the high ping may not make much difference. It depends some on how the game handles lag; if a game is quick to kick you off for high ping, that could be a serious problem.
Another game that is playable with high ping times is A Tale in the Desert. Indeed, that game often has a fair bit of server side lag, but for most activities, it doesn't matter. The game's patch system is to stop everything, make players download and apply the patch in a few seconds without having to reboot, and then proceed. (Most patches are very, very small. They're also usually undocumented, and there can be quite a few in one day when Teppy is coding.) High ping times would make glassblowing all but impossible, and interfere with a handful of other activities, but for most things in the game, a bad ping time is nothing more than a minor nuisance.
Yeah, I know this isn't the ideal option. But I just really don't have any other choice and just wanted to know if the games I listed were still somewhat playable.
Like I said, my currect internet, Verizon, isn't working very well (I've disconnected 8 times in the last hour) and my limit there is only 5 gigs a month before I get speedcapped to about 3x dial-up speeds. (And once I renew my contract, the speed cap with be replaced with a huge fee, 25 cents per megabyte)
I can't get DSL and I don't have a land line anymore, either, so I couldn't go back to dial-up. (Besides, my landline provider hit me with an additonal $50 a month overusage fee my last month, simply for using the phone to connect to my ISP 10 hours a day)
R.I.P. City of Heroes and my 17 characters there
The problem with satelite is, you will have a constant 2 to 5 seconds of lag because while you may upload at 56k modem, you have to wait for the satelite to send you information which takes 2 to 5 seconds of real time to occur, distance from space to earth being the issue. Satelite is great for browsing the internet, reading email, etc etc, things that do not require real time conversion. IMO, you would be better off with a low speed modem than satelite for gaming.
About price per MB systems. I had the opportunity to be on a system like this in Australia. It sucks. 10 minutes of gaming = about 1 mb of throughput, on a low end game, suck as half-life or quake. I am not sure how much LoTR uses but you can find out by putting a sniffer to see how many kb/s it is using and calculate from there. Based on my value though, you would get roughly 500 minutes of playtime or a little over 8 hours, with a 5 gig limit. Heh, I can chew 8 hours up in one sitting if I am up for it.
Well it might not mater much what you use if all you are playing is WURM Online. lol.
I'm a Wildblue installer and let me tell you for anything outside of General webpage surfing stuff its not worth much. There is a reason why myself and the other techs call it Boondocks internet, if you can get anything else you generally should. Hughes net and Wild Blue are both extremely similiar and both have a similiar set of Usage limits.
Bad thing about Sat is the travel distance. The thing is 22,000 miles up so you have 22,000 x 4 miles of distance for the signial pluse the landline to get from the reciecver. divide the total distance by the speed of light and best you will do is .5 sec. Land line is best but I see the cost per bandwidth sucks. Be ready for a hard time on Sat pings range from .5 to 1.5 seconds.
See, that's the thing I'm trying to get at in this thread. If the ping times are based stricly on the speed of light, that wouldn't be that bad.
As it is, my current ISP (Verizon 3G) has pings of 2000-4000 ms and the MMORPGs I play are playable, if a little sluggish. OTOH, I can't play an online FPS or racing game, I've tried, with comical results, and I doubt I could play an action games MMORPG like Conan.
On the other hand, if I have to put up with the speed of light, plus a lot of slowness on Hughes's part, it really would be worse.
R.I.P. City of Heroes and my 17 characters there
I used to be in your situation I had a choice between hughsnet or 56k and let me tell you right now 56k is better for gaming you will be wasting money if you take satelitte connection its crap.You know if I actually would log off hughes to play via 56k that it has to suck pretty bad in mmogs ping is everything the delay you get on satelitte is slower than what you get via 56k connection don't fall for hughsnet or any other sat net provider biggest scams ever and expensive
Yeah, but like I said, I don't even have 56k (well, 19.2k, what I connected at) as a choice anymore. If it's between Hughesnet and a $2500 monthly bill from Verizon, I'll have to pick Hughes...
If I have to stop gaming, I have to stop gaming, I was just hoping I wouldn't have to. (Especially since I have a lifetime sub to LOTRO...)
R.I.P. City of Heroes and my 17 characters there
See, that's the thing I'm trying to get at in this thread. If the ping times are based stricly on the speed of light, that wouldn't be that bad.
As it is, my current ISP (Verizon 3G) has pings of 2000-4000 ms and the MMORPGs I play are playable, if a little sluggish. OTOH, I can't play an online FPS or racing game, I've tried, with comical results, and I doubt I could play an action games MMORPG like Conan.
On the other hand, if I have to put up with the speed of light, plus a lot of slowness on Hughes's part, it really would be worse.
Actually the land line is between .6 and .8 speed of light due to the characteristic of the cable or twisted wire. Fiber optic is speed of light but the old trunks are still cable or even twisted wire. The distance between one point and the other is less than 8000 miles so the ping 1/4 that of a satellite.
You should be aware of a couple things here.
A Satellite will start choking your bandwidth when you are connected for a long periods of time. Satellite is on a time share and has a much more limited number of connections than land line and the bandwidth is not fiber so you get choked out as more and more demand is put on the system. Some providers do not allow continuous connection even though they say they do. Some written TOS disallow it. If you do go satellite make sure to read the TOS before buying in so you are aware of this.
Another thing is that you can get into is satellite hoping so you get sent across several units before the signal gets sent to earth. This causes extrema lagg.
Main draw backs for satellite in real time gaming - poor real time interaction due to the distance, being choked out of bandwidth at heavy load time and weather the TOS allows unlimited connection time.
Nobody suggested this so I thought I might, even though its histerically obscene:
How about move house
I play WOW over Hughesnet. I generally have latency of about 1200 ms. Obviously it isn't ideal but for PVE it works okay. I've tried playing on dial-up and the latency is better but I got frequent disconnects.
I tried LOTRO and the problem I had was that the game hitches every few seconds. That seems to be a common complaint on the forums and it might not be caused by the satellite connection.