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Bullfrog · 07-10-2008, 08:27

I just wanted to say how underwhelmed I was to be throttled the other day as it totally messed up playing Supreme Commander Forged Alliance.

I have a 10Mb service and used it to download another game from gamers gate. "A Murder of Crows" which is an expansion to "Sword of the Stars". This was over one gigabyte and cannot be bought in any other way as gamersgate has exclusive distribution rights. Later on that day I could no longer play Supreme Commander because my involvement in any game would cause a lag spike in the 1000's of milliseconds. At the same time I could play Enemy Territory Quake Wars without hinderance.

I investigated the throttle with speed test and phoned up Virgin tech support and asked around Supreme Commander chat room and came to the conclusion that it was probably due to the upstream bandwidth reducing to 124 kbps during the throttle.

I have to ask if there is really any need to throttle upstream at all. It is not just a question of im/patience. If Virgin did not throttle uplink so drastically then throttling downstream would not bother me, but throttling it in this way compromises functionality by making the service unusable for this purpose.

Supreme Commander, I discovered, needs at least 190kbps upstream to manage an 8 player game as it is a peer to peer system. When I contacted tech support I was told throttling was required by government and was to prevent piracy, presumably peer to peer transfers. But in this case it is preventing legitimate peer to peer entertainment and is not fit for purpose.

I thought I would mention it FYI, would be interested to get other peoples take on this.

07-10-2008, 08:27	#1
Bullfrog Inactive Join Date: Nov 2005 Location: Rushden UK Age: 62 Services: ntl cable and ISP Posts: 32	Throttling, cant play Supreme Commander I just wanted to say how underwhelmed I was to be throttled the other day as it totally messed up playing Supreme Commander Forged Alliance. I have a 10Mb service and used it to download another game from gamers gate. "A Murder of Crows" which is an expansion to "Sword of the Stars". This was over one gigabyte and cannot be bought in any other way as gamersgate has exclusive distribution rights. Later on that day I could no longer play Supreme Commander because my involvement in any game would cause a lag spike in the 1000's of milliseconds. At the same time I could play Enemy Territory Quake Wars without hinderance. I investigated the throttle with speed test and phoned up Virgin tech support and asked around Supreme Commander chat room and came to the conclusion that it was probably due to the upstream bandwidth reducing to 124 kbps during the throttle. I have to ask if there is really any need to throttle upstream at all. It is not just a question of im/patience. If Virgin did not throttle uplink so drastically then throttling downstream would not bother me, but throttling it in this way compromises functionality by making the service unusable for this purpose. Supreme Commander, I discovered, needs at least 190kbps upstream to manage an 8 player game as it is a peer to peer system. When I contacted tech support I was told throttling was required by government and was to prevent piracy, presumably peer to peer transfers. But in this case it is preventing legitimate peer to peer entertainment and is not fit for purpose. I thought I would mention it FYI, would be interested to get other peoples take on this.