Bandwidth, Shooters and the Den of Evil...

On Bandwidth, Shooters and the Den of Evil...
by Brad Russell
The internet is a great place. We all know that. Anything you can think of you can find on the internet (unless, of course, you're looking for a simple picture of a who from the cartoon version of the grinch). What happens, though, when one moves to a college with, how you say, minimal internet standards?
I have recently transferred colleges from the University of Missouri-Rolla to the University of Arkansas-Monticello. I feel a lot better physically and mentally, but my comp is crying every day. At UMR, there were about 3500-4000 on campus students. They served them well with fairly fast internet speeds. On average, from www.download.com, I downloaded at roughly 80 kB/sec. Now thats a pretty good download speed; it rivals many DSL speeds (this, of course, isnt true for higher end DSL buyers), and was almost as fast as the cable internet at my house (avg. 125 kB/s). UMR also had a pretty reliable server (i only remember it going down once. it was from an ice storm). My computer was pretty happy.
Nowadays, its not quite as pretty. UAM, at best, does a mediocre job at providing their students with high speed internet. UAM has about 800-100 on campus, and from the impression that I have gotten in my Microcomputer Apps class, not very many people here have computers. I'd have to say, less than half of the students here have computers on campus (at UMR I would be pessimistic if i said less than 80%). The campus has numerous computer labs; many times 2 or more in each building. I havent tried downloading anything on the computer lab computers, but in my room, I average maybe 50 kB/s from www.download.com. Thats quite a bit slower, and that number is only on good days; I have downloaded from www.download.com at 20 kB/s since I've been here. The slowness gets quite boresome.
What does this all mean? Well, to an avid internet gamer, such as myself, this is a varitable nightmare. On all of my online games I experience tremendous network lag. This may be attributed to the games servers, but I played these same games from my home and from UMR and had no such problems. The first time I noticed that my computer was getting upset at the slow network was one night when I was playing the resource sapping MMOASRPG (MMO Action Shooter RPG) Planetside. I kept receiving a message that my computer has stopped receiving packets from the network. I died numerous time from that occurring. The game has also gotten noticably slower as the semester has progressed.
The next game I noticed the horribly slow network speeds on was everybody's favorite Clickfest: Diablo II: Lord of Destruction. The usually smooth Battle.net servers (notice I said usually), began to get utterly crawl on me. I just shrugged it off as high traffic, but then on my map I saw the rest of the party was significantly ahead of me. Now, thats not too bad, but it gets me good when I lag so much that I move 3 screens away, then I zip back to what I was running from and die right as soon as the lag catches up with my movements.
I know complaining won't get anything fixed, but maybe my fellow gamers can sympathize with my predicament. Has your internet life taken a huge plunge from slow connection? Has a move displaced you and you need to get back to your gaming roots? Come by the RPGRealm Forum and drop a line.