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Internet requirements for Online Games?
I love rpg games like dragon age and witcher series a lot. But I never played a game online until I visited one of my friends home in Edmonton last week. There I played few online games like guild wars 2 and world of warcraft. I found online multiplayer games are more exciting than single player games. My computer is decent to play any single player games. But I don’t have a high speed internet connection at my home. I don’t know how much bandwidth and speed is required for online games. The high speed internet connection at my office by Terago Networks seems to be very good. But I heard they offer only business internet plans. Can someone help me in picking an internet plan which offers good speed and bandwidth limit suitable for online gaming from any ISP in the Toronto region? I don’t play more than a couple of hours every day. So I am not looking for an expensive plan.
Comments
If you're playing your standard run of the mill mmorpgs where you don't need to "aim" (like a first or third person shooter) then ALMOST any internet connection will work fairly well. I say almost because Satellite connections have a minimum latency of around 800ms so it would be terrible for anything short of checking email.
For example, you could play World of Warcraft on a dialup connection, you know, the old telephone cords you used to plug into the wall? However, if you plan on using voice comms like TeamSpeak or Mumble, you will want a broadband connection.
If you're the only one online in your home, you would be just fine with a DSL 1Mb connection. If you want to stream your game play or start watching netflix while you game, then you might want to consider something faster.
Speed isnt the only indicator you need to look at.. Ping time is the most important thing in a good connection. In all honesty online gaming is fine with a 1.5mb connection but patch downloads and digital game downloads would be slow. I am not familiar with ISPs in Canada so you should probably ask some people you know about their experiences.
Edit : To go along with the above poster.. You could play WoW over dial up and I actually did for awhile until broadband became available to me years ago. But I was never able to do any dungeons while using dial up.
I used to play MMOs on dialup before DSL was available where I lived. I had a decent ISP and my ping was acceptable. Patching was a nightmare, though.
Any bandwidth amount is acceptable. The quality of the connection is more important than the throughput. If the connection drops frequently or has other issues, online gaming won't be very fun. If your latency is too high, you won't be able to play many games and have fun.
In my experience, DSL has been more consistent than cable in terms of connection quality, but cable has always been able to provide more bandwidth. If you're lucky, the cable provider in your area might have a network without issues and you can get the best of both worlds.
If you have a cable or DSL service with 3 mbps then you have more than enough capability to play online games. Mbps means megabits per second and NOT megabytes per second. Playing a game over the internet on a slower connection of 100-200 kbps (kilobits) range is more than adequate.
That is unless you are using a remote satellite connection. As someone else already stated a satellite connection will not work well for online gaming.
The only time a bandwidth of 3 mbps or more comes in handy for gaming is when you have to download a large patch for a game. The latency of your connection is more important for gaming. Latency is how fast data can be moved from your system to the remote system.
For gaming a low latency connection (how fast) is more important than a high bandwidth (how much) connection. Most ISPs advertise their bandwidth and say nothing about their latency to your location. Those last three words are the important ones. That depends a lot on how far away, how old and how well maintained those last couple of miles of cable are to your location.
100Gb should be plenty. Use you first months usage as a measuring stick to see if you might need a bigger package, which I seriously doubt.Regarding Ping:
On Windows systems, click the start button, and search for "Command Prompt".
This should bring up a small black window.
Type: "ping www.google.com" and see what happens.
I also use www.yahoo.com, or www.cnn.com, just for giggles.
You can also type the direct internet address into the ping command: "ping 192.168.0.1" .
Or, any other internet address.
Welcome to the command line, the secret source of power for the computer and internet.
100 GB/month of bandwidth is plenty unless you want to download an entirely new game every few days or so. The initial download of a game can be anywhere from under 1 GB into the low tens of GB, and patches are usually a small fraction of the original download, so it's rare that a game will have more than a few GB worth of patches per month.
Do make sure that you get something that can be low latency. Fiber optic is ideal, but not available in many places. Cable modem or DSL will work well, too. Satellite is bad because having to bounce the signal off of satellites 22k miles above the earth's equator adds more than 200 ms to your latency.
i look this wrecked because i've got GIST.
Whats your excuse?
http://deadmanrambling.com/
I've found you can game well on just about any connection except satellite.
Even if your only option is a strictly metered connection (ie. Most cellular data plans), you can still game on them as long as your conscious about patches and downloads. I've had to play on Cellular before, and I would take a laptop into McD's or Starbucks and mooch free WiFi in order to patch, then go back home to play on my cell phone.
Not ideal, but it worked for a time.
One thing to keep in mind is if you start watching videos online or movies or tv shows etc you will chew through 100GB pretty dang fast.
Since your in Toronto you should have some nice options when it comes to ISPs so shop around and don't be afraid to look at both dsl AND cable options. I do believe some of the ISPs give you unlimited usage option too.
Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.
^ I agree with this