Trying to play WoW on a train (East Coast) on 3G.
Latency varying from 250ms to 4s and often dead spots which can last minutes, especially tunnels.
I managed to the Utgarde Catacomb quests with very little dying, though in one case I had to wait a couple of minutes to find out that I had in fact died and not won the battle.
One advantage was that I could fly all the way in to the catacomb before my mount dropped me because of tunnel breaking communications. The game client itself does not know where flying is not allowed, it is the server that tells it.
Of course, a fixed IP address on my 3G does rather help. Yay! for A&A data SIMs.
Overall I have to say that I am impressed with Blizzard that it is possible to play at all, and if not for the tunnels I am sure questing on 3G on 300ms or so latency would be usable.
Obviously this would all be totally useless for any sort of PvP or raids with other players.
How did the train wifi compare? It's free in first.
ReplyDeleteIn theory they could do this really well with multiple antennas along the train, covering all but the worst tunnels and black spots, but I don't know if they do.
Didn't try, to be honest. The splash page is good though as it shows where you are on a map, details of stations and ETA for journey, and all sorts. Sadly, as a splash page, I cannot make the camera connect to it to upload pictures.
DeleteEasy answer - can't get past the registration screen - does nothing when you click Register.
DeleteIn practice though the whole antenna part is in one place, uplink is done by multiple 3G devices and there isn't universal 3G coverage even outside the tunnels (some of which are ½ mile long and more) so it falls back to 2G (or none) and you're fighting with all the other users on the train for the vanishingly small bandwidth...
Deletehttp://www.icomera.com/rail/ for details of the service provided (to the train operator) - it could use satellite as well as backup but East Coast don't (and it wouldn't help in the tunnels anyway)