DDO LAN Party - any points of concern regarding bandwidth?

[Cauthey]

Several of my guild mates will be gathering on Saturday to run quests all day long, LAN Party style. My technical assistance question:

Should I be concerned with lag, connectivity, bandwidth, or any other issues with 4 or 5 people playing DDO at the same time across a standard-ish, home ISP connection?

I appreciate any feedback that you may have. Thank you in advance!

Cauthey

[rimble]

It'll depend on your broadband Download/Upload speed.

LAN parties work because usually you're all just networking locally together over 100 Mbps, or 1 Gbps, connections. Nobody is going out to the internet.

A MMORPG LAN party, all those people are going to be going out over your broadband link...3 Mbps? 6 Mbps?

I don't know how much bandwidth the DDO client wants...I think you'll have more latency than you're used to, but it should be playable. Really depends on your bandwidth. I don't think MMORPGs really take that much bandwidth, there just might be some contention at times that causes latency.

It's an interesting question, I hope you report back on how it goes. Check your average latency now, while you're playing alone, and check again when everyone is over.

[Belvino]

I've ran up to 5 people on 6mps Down less then 1meg Up Cable broadband with hardly any problems. Most of the Lagg was on Turbines end cause it would hit some of us but not the whole lan party, because we were in different parts of the game. There is also the factor of Population density where you live if your using Cable internet at peak times where everyone in the nieghborhood is using the internet may see some issues.

[Impaqt]

MMO's dont use that much bandwidth. MMO's need to streamline the content exchange as much as possible. too much back and forth and you could get lag. I'd be shocked if DDO used more than 50kb of bandwidth. I dont think many people really understand how much even a megabyte of bandwidth really is when it comes to raw data.

[Cauthey]

Thanks, guys. +1s the lot of you, though I think I got you, Rimble, in another thread.

We've done CounterStrike LAN Parties where the server was not on the LAN. Typically, I think most designers make the bandwidth footprint pretty small to allow for successful play even across slower links. I wasn't terribly worried - however I posed the question simply because we haven't done a LAN Party with an MMO before.

Yeah - I can't imagine that an MMO is any different than any other Online play game. Thanks for the input!

[Zenako]

I've had as many as 4 people (4 computers) playing at once, no issues we ever saw related to multiple users from the same location.

[Cauthey]

It's an interesting question, I hope you report back on how it goes. Check your average latency now, while you're playing alone, and check again when everyone is over.

Will do.

I figure I can't be the first to form up with local buddies to do this. That's why I posed the question. Someone else tried it over a sub-par DSL, etc., and it was god awful, etc. Or 10 people over 28.8, no probs. :P I had heard a whisper somewhere (double/triple boxing thread, maybe) that spoke to latency. Then I started to worry over it, likely needlessly, and just wanted feedback.

Is there an ingame tool to check latency, ping, etc? I'll take measurements, and bring those with experiences back here.

[rimble]

Is there an ingame tool to check latency, ping, etc? I'll take measurements, and bring those with experiences back here.

Errr...yeah...but I can't remember how to bring the icon up right now. It will show up automatically if your connection goes from 'green' to 'yellow', not sure what that threshold is. If you always want it on...I forget right now, but look around in the key bindings for the key combination or the settings somewhere for a check box to turn it on...once you get the network icon to show you can hover the mouse over it for stats.

[Zenako]

Its in the options menu. UI settings IIRC. There is a toggle to show/not show connection speed. Mainly helpful to know if it was just lag, or your connection is dying/dead.

[Cauthey]

Errr...yeah...but I can't remember how to bring the icon up right now. It will show up automatically if your connection goes from 'green' to 'yellow', not sure what that threshold is. If you always want it on...I forget right now, but look around in the key bindings for the key combination or the settings somewhere for a check box to turn it on...once you get the network icon to show you can hover the mouse over it for stats.

I didn't know you could mouse over for stats. Cool...I will check that out, then.