Throttling, cant play Supreme Commander

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.

Jonathan90 · 07-10-2008, 09:26

Can't do much about it tbh you had your fair share of the bandwidth accoriding to vm i don't think vm realise how the world is evolving hd streams demo's sizes have drastically increased legitimate downloads (linux dvd lol). can't help it

Bullfrog · 07-10-2008, 11:12

Actually no I didnt use up my bandwidth, I was DLing at 11.30 am at which time the limit is 2.4Gb. I only used half, otherwise I was just doing light surfing and it cant have been more than a couple of hundred megs.

It is pathetic resource management by Virgin IMHO. I only need a 4mbit download and a 512 kbit upload but I need it constantly available. This throttling **** wont do.

Wisnaeme · 07-10-2008, 11:37

The real problem I have with their STM is simply that it mucks up the data stream so badly that many services just work terribly. Using a bandwidth monitor to view the data the stream seems to be cut into time delayed chunks. These chunks are thrown at the system occasionally and this causes no end of problems. Simple browsing a basic site can take 10 seconds on my systems. Basically, when STMed the service pretty much comes to a stop for me. I don't know if Edinburgh EH7 is using a different service from others, but it's just horrible.

Jonathan90 · 07-10-2008, 12:03

My bad but it is STM so you must have hit the limit

Wisnaeme · 07-10-2008, 12:16

I know I occasionally hit the limit, but I'd expect a decent level of service after hitting it.
I only use the 2MB service, so STM hits and I typically get failed pings and a transfer of 30-60KBPs on average. This data arrives in chunks one second apart most often. Typically this causes many timeouts, FTP falls over with uploading, ITunes times out connections etc. Basically when STMed, the service is hopeless and not once achieves the level of service they advertise.

Bullfrog · 07-10-2008, 13:41

not your bad Jonathan, Virgins bad,

I cant have reached that limit, its just impossible, I am going to run DUmeter for a while (as I have done in the past) and check usage so I can check up on any throttles and catch the bug bang to rights if it happens again.

What I really object to is they say this is to stop criminal activity, this means they are criminalising me for legitimate usage and that really annoys me.

Wisnaeme · 07-10-2008, 13:54

As for metering, I like this one: http://www.metal-machine.de/readerror/

Fatec · 07-10-2008, 15:36

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bullfrog

not your bad Jonathan, Virgins bad,

I cant have reached that limit, its just impossible, I am going to run DUmeter for a while (as I have done in the past) and check usage so I can check up on any throttles and catch the bug bang to rights if it happens again.

What I really object to is they say this is to stop criminal activity, this means they are criminalising me for legitimate usage and that really annoys me.

You may also be in the trial area for ALLOT/Deep Packet Inspection throttling you're connection when you game.

Bullfrog · 08-10-2008, 08:43

Scarey thought Trax but wouldn't that affect my connection all the time? Yesterday I was playing SupCom perfectly well for example. So the throttling event the day before is what ruined my ability to play if you see what I mean?

Ignitionnet · 08-10-2008, 09:54

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bullfrog

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.

Tech support told you fibs by the way, there is no requirement whatsoever from the government to throttle. The throttling is purely a VM policy for commercial reasons.

rossdagley · 08-10-2008, 18:29

Vote with your feet. I did. Others are. Virgin wont care, but you'll feel 100x better for it. I'm sorry you're having problems - I had enough of them for a lifetime. Couldn't manage a OAP's day trip to Brighton sea world...

cook1984 · 08-10-2008, 18:42

I am in the process of moving to Be. You should be able to get much more than 10 meg from them, and it's only Ãƒâ€šÃ‚Â£18/month or Ãƒâ€šÃ‚Â£22 if you want a 2.5 meg upload (over 3x what VM offer on the top 20 meg tier).

Bullfrog · 08-10-2008, 18:46

I believe you broadbandings. To be fair I expect they are trying to solve the problem of people abusing the contention issue. The thing is they are trying to sell more bandwidth than they have got in the first place. If everyone with 10 & 20Mbit used their BB fully at the same time, the system would collapse.

Virgin rely on people not using it at the same time to offer such high bandwidths. Unfortunately the throttle setting they use to make sure that doesnt collapse is 25% of the bandwidth we paid for. That is too big a difference and will cause people who want medium usage to migrate to services which dont have a limit and which operate at the speed they say they operate 100% of the time because 100% of 4 mbit is better than 25% of 10Mbit.

Since Virgins throttle speed has to compete with constant connections with more realistic advertised speeds the throttle should be higher (about 50%) IMHO.

More than that, because the throttle is so slow, for medium users Virgins advertised speed is misrepresentation and they do try to hide it in the package details by omitting it. Virgin Broadband should be given a ticking off by trading standards. The least Virgin should do is publish the limits openly on the package pages. But they know that people will go elsewhere if they do. They are currently relying on inertia and deception because their throttling is not competitive and that is their mistake, in the long run it wont work.

EDIT: Be Unlimited for example has unlimited 24/1.3 mbit for Ãƒâ€šÃ‚Â£18 using ADSL2+ LLU, cheaper and faster than Virgin L and less hassle. Speedtest for Be Unlimited in my region is much better than Virgins. Only snag is you have to ditch your Virgin phone line to get it, oh wait that is not a snag for me is it?! Its just a snag for Virgin as they stand to lose cable and phone customers unless they figure out which way is up.

Fuzzb · 11-10-2008, 10:02

I had the exact same problem playing Supreme Commander. All other multiplayer games seemed to work fine, apart from Sup Com. My experience was that I was able to host and join games, however the pink would spike to around 4000ms every few seconds causing lag in the game and resulting in me being kicked.

After a few weeks of troubleshooting I was able to resolve the problem by changing the port used by Supreme Commander to another commonly used gaming port, e.g. one used by Quake, Unreal Tournament etc.

Once I changed the port, the game was silky smooth for me.

Load up GPGNet and go to Tools > Options, then click the Game Settings option in the menu on the left. Change the Game Port setting and click Apply.