The Way Rogers Screws Online Gaming
So I’ve gone back and been playing a bunch of Modern Warfare 2 recently, and been reminded of one of the biggest reasons I stopped playing in the first place. No it’s not the fact that after long enough all the games seem the same, and it’s not all the cheaters out there, and not entirely the fact that if you play something too much you’ll get bored of it. The lack of dedicated servers, which was a huge criticism of the PC version has actually made the game slightly unplayable for me, and whoever I’m playing with at the time when the game decides to choose me as the host.
You see, Rogers, our ISP, has this policy of not actually giving you the service that you thought you were buying. Sure I could blame Infinity Ward, the developers of Modern Warfare 2, but they’re not the only ones who do this sort of thing. If you play games on consoles you’ll see most, if not all the online multiplayer for things like the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 (maybe Wii too, but I don’t know as much about that, but who plays with the Wii’s horrible online functionality anyway?) works in a similar way to how MW2 is trying to run on my PC. One computer (or console) is chosen as a “host” for the game to be played, then all the other computers connect to that one, and the game is sort of played on the host machine.
This is where Rogers comes in. They detect that you have outgoing connections to multiple people. Once this happens, they have some special routing software kick in, and start losing the information you’re trying to send to the other players. Looking around the internet the claim they make in their defense seems simple enough. You basically share your connection with your neighbors, and if one person is using all of it, then that means the others get problems and don’t get the speeds they expect. The problem I see here is this. With the play I have with Rogers right now, they say I can get 1Mbps upload. The thing is, games don’t come anywhere close to using that, otherwise you’d be over your bandwidth cap extremely quickly by playing a game. Rogers claims that sending 10 people a small amount of information clogs up their network more than sending 1 person a very large amount of information (even when the total amount of information per second going to the 1 person is higher). I won’t claim to be an expert in this field, but I do know a thing or two about it, and I think it would be fair to say, any network where the previous statement is actually true is very poorly designed (at least if it’s a big general purpose network, like say you would expect an ISP to have).
When they start preventing your game from working properly, it can make other players unable to join, and for those lucky enough to be able to join, their information will be so out of date the game becomes completely unplayable. See when I said above, games don’t send much information, I didn’t mention that they want the information delivered quickly. Let’s Ted Stevens this post up and imagine the internet like some tubes. Let’s say you need to get some liquid from one place to another, and there’s 2 pipes that can get it there. One of these pipes can let ten litres per second go through it, but it will take one minute from when something gets put in until it comes out the other side. The other pipe can only handle 1 litre per second, but only takes one second for something to pass through entirely. Now, let’s say you have a 10000 litres of water you want to send to the other place. Which pipe do you pick? obviously it should be the larger one, sure it might take longer for the first drop to reach the other side, but on the whole it’ll be faster. Now imagine you have 2 litres of something live-saving. You should send it through the smaller one so it can get to the other end faster and save a life.
Rogers can kind of treat your internet connection like this. Not only that, but they try to make it so you don’t even know which pipe you’re sending something down, they’ll send it down the one that’s best for everyone, or at least that’s what they say. While doing some research for this post, I found the following quote:
I agree that video conferencing and voice services are a high priority. But sending email and requesting web pages? Games need a higher priority than those things, and yet with the games I’m talking about like Modern Warfare, and numerous things on xbox live they get treated like low priority file transfers. Most email clients only check with the server every 5-10 minutes to see if you have new email, it doesn’t matter if it took .1 seconds or .3 seconds to get it to the server. Same thing with webpages, how much are you going to notice the difference if a page takes .1s longer to load, sure it would be nice if it were faster but it doesn’t make your web browsing unbearably long to wait for. The thing is, in my games, that .1 second can make a huge difference in the outcome, yet instead they’re making the difference to be in full seconds, if the data ever gets there at all.
On their website, Rogers makes much mention of games being able to be played on their internet service, even saying “virtually all online games and gaming services are compatible with the Rogers Hi-Speed Internet service” without mentioning that they actively sabotage your gaming experience should you ever try and host a game yourself. I’m not 100% sure if my site is being indexed by google, and I’m too lazy to figure it out, but for all you like 4 people who actually read these posts, and anyone who might see this if I am indexed I just feel a need to say: Rogers is a horrible choice for your ISP if you’re interested in most forms of modern online gaming. They do not provide you with the service you are paying for, and despite the fact they most definitely know of the problem due to many complaints from gamers trying to use their service, seem to have no intention of fixing the problem.
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