What time on a ping becomes unacceptable?

[Blagard]

The title says it all regards playing Aces High.

Over time I have seen a steady increase in the "ping" times playing Aces High. So at what point would you view it being too long?

The answer is I know subjective depending on how serious you take your gaming, but I would like any comments to be as objective as possible because I am not asking about what you would like it to be, but at what point would you simply not log on because it will affect your pleasure playing.

I am not in the USA so naturally I get subjected to a fairly high ping anyway with the Atlantic crossing having a major impact on my connection . I will advise what my own figures are later because I don't want it to influence what your own views are. I have to add that I am only interested in connections that are at least sound with no packet loss as that element can make even a short ping bad!

[Shamus]

In the old dial up days I played at 250ms. It was a steady 250 so it played fine.

[ebfd11]

Blaggard

it is better to run a pingplot than to use the internal ping on game...

LawnDart

[The Fugitive]

According to skuzzy in the sticky thread above anything under 300 your golden. What you need is something steady. As long as it is not jumping all over the place and you have no packet loss you should be fine up to 300.

[Bizman]

They've done some improvements to the wires during the years I've been playing AH. My ping time used to be 250'ish but it has been between 180 and 200 for quite a many years now. I also remember that the game was almost unplayable between 10 and 11 PM (+2) because the British banks did some major transactions starting at 8 PM GMT. In the UK I suppose the ping should be about 150?

[-ammo-]

Here in Germany on 16 MB DSL and I get 150'ish and it plays just fine

[Blagard]

Interesting.

Being in the UK I used to regularly get 150 or a little under on occasions. So I regard 150 as being very good. Of course as noted that is when nice and steady with no packet loss.

I have played recently with it between 200 and 300 but the problem is at that level it starts to fluctuate on my connection. I have logged on at least once recently to see it showing 400+ at the arena menu and not even bothered trying.

Currently if I am thinking of playing I run ping plotter (freeware version) to get an idea of how things are. So I am inclined to accept that 300 can be OK, but only if stable and without packet loss.

For what it is worth I once had a spell of bad connections that showed to biggest delay on the Atlantic backbone. I emailed the company concerned with details including my pingplotter graphs not expecting anything (they were not my service provider) but was rewarded with a reply that it seemed the data was not going over in the right group (my words not theirs) or something to that effect. They did something, let me know and my pings were back to 150!
However the current traffic is now via another route and it does seem very variable. The downside of progress in terms of the now very heavy internet use.

The graph attached is from a few minutes ago around 22.50 GMT - one reason I no longer fly in the evening UK time!

[ebfd11]

you might want to run the pingplotter longer to get a better point of lost packets.

LawnDart

[Bruv119]

did Virgin mess you about with "free upgrades"?

they bumped mine from 60 to 100mb before xmas and it killed my download rate to next to nothing.   Fixed itself after about a week but still slower than what I was getting on 60mb package.

Ping to AH is normally 140-160 ish.

[Blagard]

did Virgin mess you about with "free upgrades"?

they bumped mine from 60 to 100mb before xmas and it killed my download rate to next to nothing.   Fixed itself after about a week but still slower than what I was getting on 60mb package.

Ping to AH is normally 140-160 ish.

I am on a 20Mb connection and due a free upgrade to 50Mb when they stop moving back the target date for it to happen!
Actually they have been pretty good. Last year my Router died and so had only one connection direct into the Virgin Modem while I sourced another router. An Engineer called to fix my noisy telephone line and while he was here, swapped my modem for the Superhub (Neatgear Cable Modem/Router) when he heard my router had died so saving me the expense of a new router. So at least I now have the hardware for the higher bandwidth when it comes.

The downside of all the free upgrades may be over utilisation as the infrastructure is stressed. - So it may happen to me when they upgrade the packages down my road.
For what it is worth I logged on around 4am (GMT) after that trace and got 130's to the AH server (checked with pingplotter). I had also just rebooted the modem after a reset due to forgetting my password to access it!

[Skyyr]

Anything under 300ms is usually playable, though that's at the upper limit of discernible latency.

[Skuzzy]

Stable variance is more important than the connection speed.

Example:  A connection with a ping that varies from 10ms to 80ms is worse than a connection which varies 200ms to 205ms.

300ms is about as high as you want it to go though.  250ms, and less, can be very solid.