How fast of internet is needed to play ddo?

[Bacab]

I recently moved and the available internet seems to be pretty slow.
I can get 3mb/s.
Is that fast enough for DDO?
So far every company that has come out to check, has not been able to hit a tower for 20 mb/s.
I might be stuck getting CenturyLink at 3mb/s.
Though hopefully they get faster internet out here eventually.

[Ganak]

With broadband, the fine print is *up to 'X' MB*

[Weemadarthur]

I recently moved and the available internet seems to be pretty slow.
I can get 3mb/s.
Is that fast enough for DDO?
So far every company that has come out to check, has not been able to hit a tower for 20 mb/s.
I might be stuck getting CenturyLink at 3mb/s.
Though hopefully they get faster internet out here eventually.

I had to play for 5 years in a place with a 2mb/s connection and had no more problems than I do now. You will still get occasional lag spikes (I still do with 50mb/s) and updates can take a lot longer but the game will still be playable with that connection.

[Gregen]

Bandwidth is largely irrelevant for online gaming. As long as you're not on dial-up, game performance won't really be impacted by download speed. The only thing that will change is download/update time. If you're choosing a provider primarily for gaming, I would look for reliability above anything else.

I used to use Comcast at 9MB/s (72Mb/s) and it would frequently drop out and hang. It sucked. I switched to a DSL provider at 4MB/s (32Mb/s) and gaming has been so much smoother. Ping is lower and there hasn't been any downtime.

I think as long as none of the providers you're looking at go below 2MB/s (8Mb/s), then go with whoever is reviewed best for reliability.

As an aside, in case anyone else comes by and is confused by the numbers, take note of lower case and capital B. 1MB = 8Mb. ISP's often like to advertise in Mb because the number looks bigger.

[TDarkchylde]

It might take forever to update the client, but as far as actual gameplay goes you'll be fine.

[Bacab]

Well this is good news then!
Thanks for the replies!

[Morosy]

One thing to remember is that internet speed is not truly "speed", just how much info comes at one time, bandwidth. The speed that the information gets to you is gonna be the same(basically the speed of light or something like that). For most things, sure, it equates to speed since more data can come down the pipe at once. But for something like DDO it just needs to send really small packets back and forth constantly (in the range of kilobits per second, it doesn't even get to the megabit range).

[Faltout]

By having the connection status active over the years, what I've noticed is the usual bandwidth used by DDO is 3-5KB/s. This means 40Kb/s or 0.04 Mb/s. Much more than any connection you're going to have.

However, keep in mind that DDO may not be the only connection user. So if there is a video being downloaded or windows updates going on in the background then they are going to use up all the bandwidth and starve DDO.

[Cordovan]

The informal answer is: Not much actual bandwidth is needed for typical gameplay, although you will have to deal with patches and updates. However, a solid connection is really important, so if that 3mb cuts in and out then you'll run into issues.

[SiliconScout]

The informal answer is: Not much actual bandwidth is needed for typical gameplay, although you will have to deal with patches and updates. However, a solid connection is really important, so if that 3mb cuts in and out then you'll run into issues.

THIS.

I have run the game off my cell phone hotspot more than once and it's been just fine, so long as the connection was stable.

[DYWYPI]

Yes, having an uninterrupted and stable internet connection is probably more important than having an extremely fast connection (when in-game). My connection is slow and its download speed will be only around 2.0 Mbps - it's extremely rare I'd get any lag. The game runs super smooth. However, if my Wi-Fi signal was weak or unstable trying to play the game would be a complete nightmare. You'd be seeing lag spikes and drop-out, rubber banding, DC'ing and allsorts on a near daily basis.

[chaosmanager]

THIS.

I have run the game off my cell phone hotspot more than once and it's been just fine, so long as the connection was stable.

I've run both WoW and DDO off of a satellite internet connection in the past. The connection was fine. As long as I remembered to account for the inherent latency, game play was fine.

Now, the 0.5s MINIMUM latency (250ms to the satellite and back to the ground station and then another 250ms to return) was a killer. I would not play on hardcore with that. :P And silly me was raid healing in WoW on that connection. I was usually at 600ms + round trip. Scary part? My healing targets were usually the last to die in a wipe. Now, if I could just get used to healing in DDO, that would be nice.

[Alrik_Fassbauer]

I'm playing DDO with a connection that has ... I think 800 KB. Null problemo, apart from lag.

You'll need an 64 bit processor for Ravenloft, I read, though.

[Propane]

I keep an eye on "ping time"

< 40 ms - good to go
41-60 - decent
> 61 - bumpy ride...

[Coffey]

Gaming servers typically have a one sec wait state to be able to syncronize the players. Using UDP packets makes movement and different actions in gameplay seemless because they are connectionless meaning they either get there or they dont without acknowlegement on the packets like TCP uses.

So if one player has 250 MS connection half way around the world they can sync up time with a player from America being the lowest latency. Quality along the route is most important for gaming.

Its just a small thread of bandwidth to play DDO really.

[Mithis]

Up until very recently I was on a 3mb dsl connection and could play DDO just fine. Updates could take a bit of time but it was not painful.

[Kafanar]

People often get confused over this topic. And for those who aren't really up on technology you want a fast connection over a big connection for gaming. Lower ping is always better and that means faster. All types of services vary but anything on Fiber should be best. Ethernet will always be better than Wifi as it should be a consistent stable connection while Wifi (even the best Wifi) can fluctuate.

A big connection will allow you to download a movie faster or run updates for a game faster as those things don't need speed instead they need a bigger connection due to the amount of data being sent. A bigger connection will not help a lot with gaming unless you are gaming in 4k or trying to do multiple things with your internet.

Example being i used to play ddo on 7m and my wife would watch netflix. It worked well with no lag.

Next i had a fiber connection of 100m and due to it being a fiber connection it was very fast. I used to run 6 instances of ddo without issue. It was fast due to being a fiber connection not because it was 100m.

If i had my 6 ddo accounts up and opened several youtube pages as well it would lower my ping. It didn't make me lag but the ping was higher meaning i wasn't seeing things happen as fast. There is only a certain point where it's even detectable by the human eye.

Fortnite would be an issue with so many other things running and a reduced ping you lose a lot of ground to other players then as speed of connection is even more important there as a first person shooter and there was probably some bottle necking on my computer with 10 youtubes 6 ddo's and virus software and whatever else running along with Fortnite running.

Moral of the story is big doesn't mean fast. Fast doesn't mean big, but people throw around the term i need a fast connection and it's often misused as they actually need a big connection like say a house full of college kids all watching movies and such. Fast helps but they'd need a big connection over a "fast" connection to account for all the users needing download capability.

It also helps to remember that sometimes it's not you're internet that's the problem. There was a new service a few years ago hosted in a foreign country that offered tv service and movies. They did well when they had a 100k customers and suddenly they became popular and had 500k customers overnight. Then people thought the service sucked and it kind of did but it was because they couldn't get their own internet service upgraded fast enough to get content to their customers so the whole problem was their internet provider. Upload speeds are much harder to get bigger connections as that little modem your using just doesn't have the power to push traffic back at your provider the was they can push service to you the customer. As we've moved from 480p to 720p to 1080I and 1080P and now 4k and beyond this will become an ever growing topic. Service will be limited by what service providers can put in to get bigger amounts of traffic across and still keep or increase the actual speed of the transfer of data back and forth.

Sorry kinda wandered around there but hopefully this will help you and/or others as well. Thanks for reading.

[DYWYPI]

Yes, it's called "bandwidth" mainly because its 'width' rather than 'speed' (think water-flow through huge wide rivers and tiny steams rather than just speed itself), also things like latency affects the game play - you don't want a high latency connection with DDO.

If you would like to read a tiny section out a book, that I co-authored (2011) covering the complex topic of: TCP/IP.

User Datagram Protocol (UDP)

UDP* is a connectionless "unreliable delivery" protocol operating at Transport Layer 4. As a result, UDP has no requirement for receiving protocols like TCP (also Layer 4) to acknowledge the receipt of data packets. It doesn’t concentrate on establishing connections like the TCP protocol, so it can transmit information faster than TCP; it is the upper application layers that are used to control its reliability. UDP is also useful for VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), streaming multimedia, and online multiplayer games moving small quantities of data—it's built for speed.

* [...] If UDP were a car it would be a lightweight Formula One racing Car. ...

In-game DDO needs to move fairly small quantities of data very fast; relying heavily on UDP, which as I explained is an "unreliable delivery" protocol primarily built for speed, etc. I feel my footnote was a good analogy meaning; it needs to move data very fast and isn't at all heavy. :-)

[Sho-sa]

I played for many years on a connections which rarely got above 700 kb/s. I only have a higher bandwidth now as different company was cheaper. No difference whatsoever in playing DDO except that updates download faster.

[Sylvado]

Yes, it's called "bandwidth" mainly because its 'width' rather than 'speed' (think water-flow through huge wide rivers and tiny steams rather than just speed itself), also things like latency affects the game play - you don't want a high latency connection with DDO.

If you would like to read a tiny section out a book, that I co-authored (2011) covering the complex topic of: TCP/IP.



In-game DDO needs to move fairly small quantities of data very fast; relying heavily on UDP, which as I explained is an "unreliable delivery" protocol primarily built for speed, etc. I feel my footnote was a good analogy meaning; it needs to move data very fast and isn't at all heavy. :-)

I often wondered if UDP packets were treated any differently by WAN optimizers and were the cause of some players having horrible lag and others none at all.