Quote:
Originally Posted by Ravager
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Not a silly idea, though the power gamers here will reminisce about playing on cable and 8 boxing and that throttling so much isn't classic, but throttling to 512 would be near the high water mark in 2001 (a couple report higher, but even they admit that it's in special test cases), which would come to 64KB/s: http://www.overclockers.com/forums/s...-or-cable-dsl)
They'd cry about all of the link deaths from zoning and having trouble logging in and what-not, but that's classic too. |
You simply don't know what you're talking about. Everquest works exceptionally well on low bandwidth connections and even while AOEing the entire Plane of Fear never comes close to maxing out the bandwidth of even a 128K ISDN connection. 128k ISDN was affordable and readily available in most decently sized cities by 2001. I think I paid $60 a month for mine and lived in a small city of only 150,000 people at the time.
What matters to EQ isn't bandwidth, but rather latency aka ping times. EQ doesn't send a tremendous amount of information back and forth while you are playing, only that the little bit of information that it sends back and forth doesn't get too delayed as to cause lag or desynches.
I average maybe 100-200mb a month at most of data usage from Everquest. Which includes at least a couple hours a day of actively playing and I often leave characters online 24/7 sitting at rare spawns or in EC.
In 2016 I live in a rural area we are limited to only 4G from Verizon Wireless, and having no unlimited data plans means I quickly often use up my monthly allotment of my high speed 4G data (30-50+mbps) get my internet connection throttled down to 2G (128kbps) speed and have no problems and see no difference playing EQ or doing AoEs at this throttled speed because the latency is low (under 50ms). Ironically this throttled speed of Verizon Wireless 4G is identical to that of 128kbps ISDN that I was using in 2001. Even zoning times are totally unaffected by my bandwidth being throttled.
See 28.8 and 36.6 modems were the norm in 1999 when EQ was first released, and as long as you didn't do ANYTHING else online while EQ was running you could play with little to no lag even on a 28.8 modem. The network stack in EQ was designed with these bandwidth limitations in mind.
The disconnects came if you had something else was maxing out your bandwidth, you had excessive amounts of noise on your phone line from poor quality copper lines from the telco, someone else in your house picked up a phone and tried to make a phone call, or you didn't disable call waiting with a special dial code and incoming phone calls would disconnect you. All of these things would negatively effect latency and/or cause packetloss which are the real problem causers for EQ, and all other real time network applications for that matter.
But if everything was simply setup properly, call waiting was disabled, you didn't share a phone line with other people, your telephone lines were not damaged, you had a reasonably solid ISP, and you were careful that nothing else on your computer was using any bandwidth of any kind it was perfectly reasonable to play EQ and even do AoE groups on even a 33.6k connection 100% lag free. Many dial-up connections can stay at a steady 100-150ms ping times which is just fine for playing EQ.