ecently, I've been hard at work at not working hard.  Its not an easy thing to do, when I have so many fun work projects to do... but I do find a few minutes to 'not work'.  What I've found is that the state of the internet... the health of our backbones, and general online gaming has gotten WORSE!  Lag has gotten, statistically, worse in the 2 years I've been running this blog.

Now some of you may say, but we have more broadband.  Yes, there is more broadband 'connect points' in the world today than 2 years ago, but they are all eating the same pipes!  In fact they are the ones causing more and more congestion at your local ISP.  In our new office, our ISP suddenly decided it was better to route our traffic through Kansas and back. Now how is this 'better'?  I think we should all consider the health of the internet, and in general how much USE is going on by users who are NOT gaming...  and think of some solutions.

Yes, it is true, that is my field.   I live to fight Lag.  Yes, I have many ideas.  One thing for sure, we have to stop treating gaming traffic like everything else.  Gaming + TCP Protocol should not mix.  Why force yourself to go slow when you lose a packet!  And why ack every packet.  And why optimize exactly how much data you put into a packet???

MMOs don't seem to care.  More and more are coming out with TCP as the protocol of choice.  Why? Because it is easier, and THEY don't think you will care.

So, if you are playing: Age of Conan, World of Warcraft, or Several other popular MMOs... SPEAK UP.  THEY don't think you care about Lag.  I know you do.

Keep up the fight!  I'm dedicated to doing more of these posts as we go along.

Tytus