Spawning A losing game

[Gig]

I don't know what to think...

Maybe you may try the speedtest or ping test selecting some server more far from you (I think it is possible)...

[grey matter]

If you experience packet loss or connection problems in general when more players play, it is quite likely that either

• your framerate drops, which causes "lag"
• the server needs better hardware

You can observe your framerate by "/seta cg_drawFPS 1". The game will then draw your current frame rate in the upper right as "XYfps", where XY should be above 60 for somewhat smooth gameplay.

Did you try playing at unusual times, e.g. in the middle of the night? Sometimes ISPs oversubscribe their lines or overuse QoS.

[RMF]

It's not uncommon that ISPs block ICMP altogether, or throttle it back. There is also one 134ms ping from that location, which means the thing is capable of responding that fast, and all further pings (for example to hop 19) are much more stable. So this router at hop #15 probably just throttles the traceroute, but passes the signal on just fine.

Try to find out the physical location of the servers in the list. If I play at an American server (I'm from Europe), ~125 ping is the lowest I have ever had. Around 135 is common.

Edit: Note that between hops 13 and 14, the hostname indicates that the signal goes from Boston to London, which is quite a distance and explains the 55ms to 125ms jump.

[Drastic]

Since most of the servers it seems are not U.S., that explains a lot and why I'm getting such random high pings and packet loss. No question, that would be a major issue.

I began playing today after I requested a service upgrade, which does route a bit better I guess but my ISP does in fact throttle UDP which may be another issue with this whole mess. Either way, I had some decent play today and actually got to win quite a few matches which is amazing since I haven't come close yet. The targeting was way better and what I found was, with a lower grade service, even with high download speeds, the quality they use basically stinks. The more you upgrade, the cleaner connection you get, not just speed, or so a tech told me.

Yep, usually between 4 pm and 6 pm my time is when the service gets nasty then clears up after that. What gets me is, now that it's holding up, I developed more issues which had me nearly tearing out what's left of my hair. For no reason, no change in anything on my system, I get, could not load xx.bsp on near every server I tried a bit ago. I tried instas, dms, etc... all the same. Prior to that, my mouse would quit firing in game, no response. I do want to mention, someone with near 700 ping joined an insta game and my connection went to crap, the game became choppy and slow, as soon as they quit, it was back to normal.  This may have to do with the number of ppl that join as well, the throttling is what's likely causing this then. It makes sense.

I sorta laughed although frustrated, I finally get good game play and now can't load any maps on servers lol. 

[Drastic]

Ok, final statement here.

All is back to normal, maps loading etc... I don't know why it did that maybe just a hiccup.    Anyway, there were 3 instances where players' pings went from 150 range to over 400 and it did in fact affect my game play horribly, to the point of barely being able to shoot. Oddly enough, there were 3 all in the last half hour this happened with, not sure if connection issues going on somewhere else. My connection should not be affected but it is, still as it was prior but only when there are huge amounts of players or extreme high pingers so on average, I get to play most of the time without oddities.

That aside, I am more than happy with how it plays right now and would like to put out a huge THANK YOU to Gig and everyone else who helped, it was very much appreciated!   

That said, I'm playing, I'm happy with the game and especially the community thus far.

[Gig]

Happy to hear you can actually play, now, even if you still have some problem that, with your bandwidth, should not happen.
As a client, OA does not need more that 25000 bytes/sec... if you set data rate to Lan/Cable/xDSL, "rate" variable is set to 25000... while whit your bandwidth (I noticed 3MB upload in your screenshots), you should be able to host a nice server by your own.

By the way, your ISP policies seems quite strange... giving something about 40-3 Mb bandwitdh and requiring extra money to have a more or less stable connection...

[GrosBedo]

If you encounter again those latency problems, you can try to run a more complete test on your connection when this is happening using a tool such as iPerf:

http://iperf.sourceforge.net/