GW not so 56k friendley anymore?

Hi, my name is Thock, and I suffer from 56k syndrome.

When I first got this game (5 months ago) one of the reasons was because it is/was 56k friendly. I had no problems playing the game, I could also even use voice chat programs while I played. Flash forward a couple months and I can’t use voice chat without having severe lag. A month or so later, 8v8 PvP is too much for my poor connection to handle. Now if I load into a busy district (ex. LA1-3) I lag like crazy and even occasionally get err=7.

As far as it being a problem with my system, I have a gig of ram, a 256mb video card, and an AMD Athlon XP 3000+ processor. I have a virus scanner (AVG), Firewall (Sygate), 2 Spyware scanners (Ad-aware and Spybot S&D), and a spyware blocker (Spyware Blaster). All of these are updated and ran twice a week to daily, depending on which program your talking about.

Anyways the point of this topic isn’t to gripe and moan about my lack of a descent Internet connection. I want to know if there are any other 56kS sufferers out there that have noticed GW slowly requiring more bandwidth. One begins to wonder when simple PvE will be too much or if Chapter 2 will be playable for me. Also if you know of any alternatives other than: Fiber, DSL, Cable, ISDN, Satellite, or Wireless, let me know. It’s not for lack of cash (other than a $700 satellite) but my location that is the problem.

Can you overclock a modem to make it run faster?

Any registry tweaks or second party software that can speed up actual connection speed (not page loading or download accelerating but actually speeding up the connection)?

Any other 56k users out there (yeah right, I feel like the last man on earth episode from The Twilight Zone) that are having the same problem?

At the mods: I wasn’t sure where to put this as it deals with technical support as well as directing questions to the community about if they have any of the same problems and/or any solutions to my dilemma. If this is the wrong place then please move it and slap/ban/burn at stake/turn me into a newt for being a tard at 6a.m.

If you read all that you deserve a cookie: @

Frankly, and no offence, it sounds like you have ISP/connection problems. If you have any possibility of testing another ISP, you might want to do that.
Also remember that _anything_ which accesses the net while you play will cause severe lag. E.g. I had problems until I found out that my virus scanner thought the computer was idle when I played GW, and started downloading updates. Filesharing apps will do this too.

I have it on good athourity that you CAN overclock a 56k modem, I have no idea how but at least you can look for info safe in the knowledge that it is out there...somewhere

A follow up on what Numa just wrote: my wife playing on a computer next to me is constantly annoyed by the oh-so-wonderful-let-me-take-over-your-computer-completely Norton AntiVirus while playing GW. Out of the blue in the most intense battle comes a complete slow down of her computer, and when she is able to switch over to the desktop she finds that Norton decided to update itself or run a scan. So it is very important to shut off antivirus completely while playing GW.

One thing about that to remember is that anything that monitors and scans traffic to and from your computer should tend to slow things down when playing GW because of the communication needed to play the game.

Regarding idle speed, Numa, I noted the other day that while GW was active, my computer was showing 100% cpu usage, which I thought to be kind of strange. If that truely is the case, then this particular computer is not the best for GW (bottleneck is waiting on the CPU rather than on the communicated traffic) but then this should stop Norton from starting up its tasks, but doesn't.

well... i moved to Africa this summer (since my mtoher is a dilpotmat)
and here i download with 5-9 kp/s (i dont know how fast that is... if any one knows a formular how to find out ur conenction speed with ur kp/s)
and i run the gmae without lagg or delay, but i start laggin while doing some gvg..

Alot of peeps have reported this, myself included.

apparantly when its in full screen mode its not so bad, but switch to window mode and its 100%. Ive yet to test this, as it causes no problems so im in no rush too. (you should see in the CPU history if this is true).

And yes, switch of any virus scanners ect, whilst playing GW.

Does this good authority work in telecommunications business? Where is this knowledge?

You can probably overclock the modem, its just hardware after all. but i doubt that would affect the speed of info being sent downt the line.

I'm playing this on 56K modem and not experiencing any in-game lag that comes from GW itself. Yes I actually had to stop playing today because the lag was terrible, but it was terrible for everything - ie my ISP was being a slow boogar! But apart from the occasional odd-ball like that I play GW fine without anyworry.. can do big fights and such.. only thing I don't do is vioce-chat.

As stated above - make sure you close ANYTHING which could be accessing the internet (except your firewall, never drop that if you have 1) as they will slow you down. Make sure instant messaging programs such as MSN, AOL, IRC clients, etc are closed.. shutdown your AV, etc.

As for your specific issue's with not being able to do vioce-chat anymore or do 8v8 GVG's.. I don't know. I'd talk to your ISP as it sounds like they are doing what an old ISP of mine did - over-sell it's capacity.. ie they have capacity for say 10k customers on their bought bandwidth but have sold accounts to 15K people.. thus more poeple eating up the bandwidth and thus everyone gets slow, slow, slow! So yeah, basically it might be time to look into changing ISP's if you can.. or at least talking to your current one about the lag issue's.. because IMO it's their fault.. not GW's.

ktadie - thats ~56K modem dial-up speed. If I download a file I d/l @ 4-10 kb/sec... all depending on where I download from and time of the day.

Theres no way to "overclock" your actual speed. BTW its called a 56k modem, but most actually run at 28.5k

UIt is a problem with your ISP, my friend played without any serious problems until about 2 weeks ago on Dialup (he got cable internet for Christmas).

Hiye,

I play from Pakistan on Euro Servers, on 56k, I have no problems with TS + Tombs/GvG , yeh, TS dies totally when im in a town with lots of people, thats obvious.

Other then that, its fine. If a guild uses TS properly, just for ordering commands and plan of attack on TS during a match, not chit chat, so, like yea, im not fond of 56k , but it seems to be fine for me.

Sometimes, what anti-viruses do is they start downloading updates, while ur in GW, so well..thats not going to be good you see. So make sure only GW and TS is using ur precious little bandwidth.

Despite all this, I intend to move to 256kbps as soon as the connection service arrives in our area..so thats 2-3 months of waiting...right in time for GW Factions

As for overclocking a modem, hehe, thing is, your telephone connection cannot permit data at 56k, infact when you connect using dial up, you dont connect at 56k, but at around 40-48k.

There is too much distortion in line, perhaps you could connect at 55-56k if your land lines happen to be of fibre-optics, but usually its copper and its not 100% efficient.

INternet is just a pain in general

I have experienced what ARon describes; my more-than-good-enough PC runs GW with no lag usually but window it and it becomes jerky. I've never looked at the CPU useage though.

Could well just be your internet being dodgy. Contact your ISP. My ISP regularly has dodgy moments (it should be 1mb connection, but sometimes if we do a test it'll be downloading at 94kb :S)

Just exit every program (except a firewall), be it MSN, Antivirus, heck even Solitaire. Coz it'll lag if your memory is used up as well as if the connection is slow.

Push ctrl alt delete

go to processes & go to google
type all .exes into google, see which ones you can end, and do that

usually only explorer.exe and taskmgr.exe is needed, everything else is trivial.

start - run - msconfig - startup - disable all - ok - reboot

magic for windows

I did that once, needless to say I had to go into windows safe-mode. its still best to know what your disabling before doing so though, but generally 85% of the stuff under startup in msconfig is either spyware or crap.

Be careful with that magic, I prefer my firewall (sysgate personal firewall) and Nod32 Antivirus to be loaded on startup myself. But that is a great way for a huge performance boost of windows not loading anything and trouble shooting.

Or you can turn them on after windows comes up, hmm I may have to try this. I can also write a batch file to turn on what I want to come on that I can hit too

Actually, I disable explorer.exe as well. It eats a lot of rescources.

(explorer.exe is basically your desktop)

To get it back when your done w/ GW, ctrl-alt-delete, click run, then type explorer.exe.

i get this prob too. it's DEFINATLY not my comp, (Dual AMD FX-55 4 GIG DDR 10,000 RPM Raptor 200 Gig HD Ati X800 graphics)

As far as the running proceesses, other programs, and removing items from startup, nothing else is running other than my firewall. I even tried shutting it down to no effect.

@numa: The reason I havent yet pointed a finger at my ISP is that my connection speed has alwasy been the same. One of the things I love about the Sygate firewall is that it shows how fast im sending and recieving.

@coolsti: One of many reasons I switched to AVG antivirus. Sure, it doesnt have all the spiffy tools symantec offers, but its free and wont take your machine over.

If your ISP supports multilink, and you can cheaply get another phoneline, with two phone-lines and two modems, you can up to double the speed you currently get.

Overclock a modem? Ummmm......no.

First of all, most modems in use today are softmodems, meaning that they don't have an actual DSP to process the telephone signal into data and data into telephone signal. Softmodems do all of the DSP work in a software driver, so it's actually you computer's CPU that's doing the work of the DSP.

Second, even if you did have a real hardware modem and could somehow find a way to make the DSP chip run faster (unlikely), it would make exactly zero difference. The reason that there are no modems faster than 56k (if they claim to be they're using some kind of extra compression that makes little difference) is a limitation of the medium, not the hardware. You can't transmit data any faster than 56k over a telephone signal, and in most places you can't do better than 48k. Heck, if you're in an area with old/"dirty" wiring you probably can't do better than 26-28k. The only way to get more speed from your phone line is to piggyback on another medium like ISDN or DSL.

Oh, or magic. You could use magic.

True, but in most areas DSL is cheaper than doing that.

Ah. This makes me feel better I just offered this game to a friend for chirstmas and realised that he had dial-up internet. I never thought that the game would actually work for him

It'll work as long as the wiring in his house & telecom area is decent. Bad wiring really slows down your dial-up connection speeds, but if he can get 42k+ he should be ok. His connection might be a little laggy or drop every once in a while, and some updates will take a looooong time, but it should be playable.