O2 HomeAccess gaming problem

[allenel88]

I tried playing StarCraft2 and xbox live game like PES2011 with my HomeAccess, and everything went well, until I tried to play World of Warcraft. When my character enter some areas full of other player, the latency can jump to 2k-10kms, but when I move my character to some areas with very few players, the latency just stay under 800ms. I tested these games again (games on my laptop) with btopenzone and sky broanband (at my friend's home), both of SC2 and WoW's latency stayed under 200ms. I really dont know whats going on with my HomeAccess now. Can anyone help me with this problem?

[Saturday]

When you get this problem are you connecting via wireless or wired?

[Tony1044]

And does it affect anything else?

When it occurs, what happens if you try to ping [url=http://www.bbc.co.uk/url] ?

[allenel88]

Originally Posted by Saturday

When you get this problem are you connecting via wireless or wired?

I was connecting via wireless when this first happened, but when I tried to connect via wired, the same thing happened again...

[allenel88]

Originally Posted by Tony1044

And does it affect anything else?

When it occurs, what happens if you try to ping [url=http://www.bbc.co.uk/url] ?

just tried. In game latency is 2k-3k ms ,and the ping on bbc is 23ms.
btw I do not share the network with anyone and I do not download or upload anything when I play online games. Hope someone can help me.

[Saturday]

23ms to bbc.co.uk is very good for for a non LLU connection so it would seem unlikely that your problem is directly related to the Homeaccess service.

I can think of a number of possible causes: could be a routing/server issue, either inside or outside O2's control; could also be as simple as a problem with your gaming hardware. Also, don't bother trying to play a game like that (or any complex game) wirelessly.

Hopefully someone else may have better ideas that can help you.

[Undecided adrian]

Do you know which server you are trying to play on as Blizzards French Datacenter uses Telia as their ISP which has been rubbish since the game launched. Virgin customers 5 years on still have huge problems with Virgin and Telia pointing fingers at each other.

The German Datacenter apparently is a lot better and I know quite a few people who have moved over to their servers.

Note this is on English speaking servers but some of them are hosted in Paris and the rest in Frankfurt.

[allenel88]

I dont really know whether my server is in French or German, but the interesting thing is I played WoW on the same game server last year using HomeAccess and things went smoothy. After this summer, I moved to a new appartment and still use HomeAccess playing on the same game server but the latency is too high. So I think there are not too much problems between ISPs.

[allenel88]

Originally Posted by Saturday

23ms to bbc.co.uk is very good for for a non LLU connection so it would seem unlikely that your problem is directly related to the Homeaccess service.

I can think of a number of possible causes: could be a routing/server issue, either inside or outside O2's control; could also be as simple as a problem with your gaming hardware. Also, don't bother trying to play a game like that (or any complex game) wirelessly.

Hopefully someone else may have better ideas that can help you.

Thanks for the tip, and btw do you think this is caused by the upload limit set by HomeAccess package? which is 445kb/s. It may explain why I experience high latency when my character is in some areas with loads of other players.

If this is not the cause, do you think if it would be helpful if I change my mac address?

[Saturday]

Can't see that the upstream limit is the cause of your problem. If it was then millions of gamers around the world with standard broadband speeds would have the same issue.

Can't see how changing your mac address would help either.

In my experience the vast majority of online gaming problems are down to overloaded gaming servers, the rest down to connection and hardware issues.

It would appear not to be your laptop as you say it isn't such an issue using a friend's connection. If at the same time as you have gaming lag you're getting fast pings to bbc.co.uk then it's not your connection, could be a routing issue but most probably a game server overload. Again, as adrian has advised, a change of server often brings dramatic improvements.