To begin with, understand that for the last 18 months or so, I've been driving 18-wheelers over the road so have only been able to fly once a month or so. Also understand that 90% of the time I'm snot-slingin' drunk when I fly AH, and the rest of the time I've got a damn good buzz, so my recollection of events might be suspect, but probably no more so than any other pile-it's
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Anyway, I live way out in the sticks of Louisiana, where I've only got a 26.4 dial-up connection. Plans to bring broadband out here have foundered several times over the last several years, and odds are it'll be another few years before it happens. Be that as it may, however, when AH first went to collecting money, I had pings to the MA of about 50 and about 80 to the other arenas.
So things remained until the 1st server move or provider change or whatever it is HT and Pyro do to us when they want to stir the pot. That bumped these numbers up a bit. And so has ever other change of this type over the past few years, until by last fall I was getting a ping of about 80 to the MA and a bit over 100 to the others.
Then Katrina hit. My phone goes through New Orleans to leave the state, so of course it was AFU'd.
From that time until about the middle of January, my connection has been so bad that AH has been unplayable. I always switched to TCP within 5 seconds of entering an arena, hardly ever had vox, and the warps and lag were ungodly. And somewhere in the there, HTC switched providers or servers again. Anyway, 6 weeks ago, my Katrina problems seemed to be over and things stabilized at their new high point after the last HTC change. This was a bit higher ping than before Katrina, but at least it was stable and pretty playable.
Then yesterday HTC changed things yet again. As expected, my ping has bumped up another 10-20 as a result, plus the whole system seems a bit less stable than before. I saw a number of warps and discos and went to TCP myself.
Now, I understand and appreciate HTC's continuing desire to provide improved connectino quality to us customers. And I realize that I'm trying to play a 21st Century sim with 2 cans and a piece of string which had some issues with the weather last year. But ain't enough enough?
I'm serious. Every change HTC has made has ended up being worse for me. Why can't we go back to the original server/provider?
