Hello,

I’m not a gamer myself, so don’t have any first hand experience, but I’m trying to work out whether people who enjoy on-line gaming (by which i mean console to console or PC to PC over an internet connection) ever have problems with the speed of their internet connections, and *whether this affects the game*. Ultimately whether the general gamer would be prepared to pay a little extra, for example, in their monthly Service Provider bill to sort it out (don’t worry I’m not trying to sell you anything!!!).  Are games generally time critical I guess is the question, although you may have a different perspective of this. 

Are there scenarios, for example if your housemate is doing a big file transfer, or someone makes a skype call, which might mess up your game, due to slowed response times?

It may be that there is no problem with bandwidth affecting gaming experience, but it seems to me that if your internet bandwidth is in high demand it might be the gamer who looses out… 

 Any points of view will be greatly appreciated!

 Thanks for your time.

faster = better

Whats ssj12 said. A lot of routers will allow you to select a program or computer and give bandwidth priority to it. It does help, for example with CoD4 my ping is usually around 30-50 if I only have the computer its on turned on. Before I prioritized the game if I had another computer on the ping would be over 100 and if I had everything on (Wii, computer, printer) it would be around 150. Now the ping is around 60 with everything on.

I assume that affects a download on the other computer but I haven't tested it. What I have tested is I do much worse in CoD4 when the ping is over 100 than below it.  When it is over 200 it is flat out unplayable in my opinion.  I used to play Call of Duty back i nthe day with a 56k connection.  The ping was always over 500 and yes it is horrible trying to play under those conditions.

If people in the game have vastly different connection speeds, it creates what we call 'lag'. When this happens, information is not communicated between the systems fast enough. The most typical effect is that you will see an enemy player standing there, and you'll shoot him, but nothing will happen, because he isn't actualy standing there--he has actually moved. What has actually happened is that his computer is taking too long to tell yours that he has moved, and thus yours does not know it yet.

ssj12 took the words out of my mouth.