What internet speed is necessary to play DDO?

[ilya187]

I am looking to change my internet provider, and realized I do not know what internet speed I need. My modem handles up to 2 GBps, but I am pretty certain Comcast (my current provider) delivers much less than that. So how much do I actually need for DDO?

 

[Arkat]

Honestly, 1.5 Mb is probably all you really need as long as your latency (ping times) was also good (less than 100 ms?). It's a 17+ year-old game so keep in mind what internet speeds were like 17+ years ago. DDO had to be able to be played with those speeds.

Faster would be better, of course, and so would lower ping times.

 

[DYWYPI]

Having an uninterrupted and stable internet connection is probably more important than having an extremely fast connection (when in-game). My connection is slow and its download speed will be only around 2.0 Mbps – it's extremely rare I'd get any lag. The game runs super smooth. However, if my Wi-Fi signal was weak or unstable trying to play the game would be a complete nightmare. You'd be seeing lag spikes and drop-out, rubber banding, DC'ing and allsorts on a near daily basis.

It's called "bandwidth" mainly because its 'width' rather than 'speed' (think water-flow through huge wide rivers and tiny steams rather than just speed itself), also things like latency affects the game play – you don't want a high latency connection with DDO.

If you would like to read a tiny section out a book, that I co-authored (2011) covering the complex topic of: TCP/IP.

User Datagram Protocol (UDP)

UDP* is a connectionless "unreliable delivery" protocol operating at Transport Layer 4. As a result, UDP has no requirement for receiving protocols like TCP (also Layer 4) to acknowledge the receipt of data packets. It doesn’t concentrate on establishing connections like the TCP protocol, so it can transmit information faster than TCP; it is the upper application layers that are used to control its reliability. UDP is also useful for VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), streaming multimedia, and online multiplayer games moving small quantities of data—it's built for speed.

* [...] If UDP were a car it would be a lightweight Formula One racing Car. ...

In-game DDO needs to move fairly small quantities of data very fast; relying heavily on UDP, which as I explained is an "unreliable delivery" protocol primarily built for speed, etc. I feel my footnote was a good analogy meaning; it needs to move data very fast and isn't at all heavy.

 

[rabidfox]

iirc DDO recently changed some network settings away from being optimized for dial-up; so I doubt you need much.

 

[Rauven]

I play using a T-Mobile 4G hotspot. I average 25 Mb down, 5 Mb up, and over the last month between two clients (I dualbox) I have used less than 2 gigs of data. My pings are usually around 85ms, but can fluctuate between 70 to 150ms. When running around 150ms there is some stuttering when jumping, but not to the point that doing The Pit makes me want to punch a baby seal.

 

[Dandonk]

If you play on dial-up, you probably can't even tell the difference between the slow and bad connection and the lag