MWEB discusses WTFast for MMO gamers

[Tinman]

MWEB discusses latest MMO latency solution

We chat to MWEB's new gaming manager about using WTFast as a solution for MMO gamers

[shadowfox]

Nice to see some answers to the questions that were raised Thanks for that Tinny.

I agree it would be awesome to actually have servers for various MMOs hosted in South Africa - the only drawback to that is that you would lose touch with most of the international community - and it's that community which is one of the things I most love about MMOs. Anyone who has played MMOs over a period of years will no doubt have made a couple of pals, or even formed lasting friendships - and I don't see Europeans willingly connecting to our local servers (although it may serve as something of an eye-opener when they realise what it's like playing with actual latency )

[Weasley]

Ya cant see how a app can actually reduce latency. At best it can only prevent abnormal spikes

[shadowfox]

Ya cant see how a app can actually reduce latency. At best it can only prevent abnormal spikes

Basically, MMOs use TCP/IP protocols to handle their incoming/outgoing traffic - the problem with this is that computers tend to wait for a certain number of packets to accumulate before sending them on as a bundle. What these applications do is to establish a secure connection with the gaming servers that allows them to send the packets as they arrive instead of waiting - basically speeding things up a little.

It really only works in the client and server are some distance from each other - if the client and server are really close to each other then it'll actually have the reverse effect - since the traffic would first be routed to the application's server before going to the game server.

The best theoretical ping we would be able to receive here in South Africa from Europe, assuming the shortest possible distance between two points - would be roughly 60 - 70ms, but because of all the extra hops and servers the signal needs to pass through it ends up taking longer (also, because the lines don't go in a straight line) - so these servers also effectively (or so we hope) reduce the number of hops your packet needs to travel.

That's how I see it anyways - I'm not an expert