Is Age of Conan being Traffic Managed Properly?

[#1]

If you want to wait till next Bill date for change that is, also caps a joke on that package.  Just playing conan during day would use your cap in a month.
cp:quote

[#2]

Package changes can often be made immediately, subject to paying the difference in cost pro-rata over your remaining period.
And tbh, the Pro package has plenty of allowance.  I'm on Pro and two people in my household play WoW from 6pm-1pm weekdays and ~9am-1am weekends.  There are also generally two EVE Online sessions running permanently, lots of browsing and  2 x Teamspeak users.  I also managed to download 8 episodes of two popular TV series via torrent over the course of last month.
Total usage: 15.86GB
I fail to see how basic usage of Conan would use that up "in a month".  Downloading patches maybe, but you can always schedule that sort of thing out of hours.
B.

[#3]

Hi there,
Would you really use about 15GB in a month?  How much time are you spending on a daily basis?
Online gaming should only really take about 30-50MB per hour.  From what I can see, looking at the traffic that you are using, only a small amount of this is from gaming traffic.
We are trying to get the change work to ensure that Age of Conan is prioritised as soon as possible though.  Hopefully we should have some timescales for you all later on today.

[#4]

I also suffer from this problem with Age of Conan. The server I am on is Ymir - not sure of the IP address though.
The general AOC url is aoc-eu.live.ageofconan.com
I appreciate the work you guys are doing to fix the problem - please can you post when the changes are made?
Many of us reporting this issue atm are in the 'early access' phase of the game - we have approx 6 days early access (Started Saturday) before it goes completely open to thousands of user across the world.  Over 1 million people registered for the beta - so you can expect to see a big increase in traffic to their servers in the next few days as thousands of new UK users will be accessing the software for the first time.
As for volumes of data transfered in MMORPGs - this is a few Mb per hour typically.  I have played many MMORPGs and have rarely got close to 1GB data transfer over a month - with over 60 hours per month logged into a game.  The only way data usage goes up - is with patches to the software - which is v common in the early days of new MMORPGs as they find lots of nice 'undocumented features' that they like to fix and patch - so you can expect a few hundreds of Mb/ GB of patches over the first few months.
I downloaded AoC client (approx 16Gb of data) pretty much without using my ISP limit by downloading between midnight and 7am (free on my package) - you might want to consider this if large downloads cost you cash!

[#5]

Quote from: Jameseh

Online gaming should only really take about 30-50MB per hour.  From what I can see, looking at the traffic that you are using, only a small amount of this is from gaming traffic.

I thought it was more I had a good morning session on Call of Duty 4 on the PS3 with very little else running on my network and it seemed to use up nearly 1GB of usage. That's what put me off moving to pro, as i was tempted. So i'd agree with wilddemoncat that if i did that a couple of days a week my usage would be eaten up.

[#6]

A gigabyte?! That equates to roughly 256Kbps which is loads higher than I would expect it to be.  I'll see if I can get some feedback internally, but I really wouldn't expect it to be quite so high!
In other news, the person who normally deals with the change process is unfortunately off today, but he'll be processing them tomorrow, meaning that AOC should be prioritised correctly on Thursday.

[#7]

Quote from: Jameseh

A gigabyte?! That equates to roughly 256Kbps

Shocked me a bit too, I put it down to the fact it uses P2P for online.

[#8]

Actually, I calculated that in Kilobytes.  It works out as 2222Kbps (kilobits).  That's like more than saturating a 2Mbps line.
Are you downloading anything else via your PS3 at the same time?

[#9]

Quote from: Firejack

I'm not having any problems on Ymir. What server you playing on?

After Kazari said he was also having latency problems on Ymir. I decided to check Wireshark to see why I'm not having any problems. Looking at Wireshark it does indeed show AoC is classified as Silver for me too.
Now I've been playing between say around 1-4pm and 10-12pm. That leads me to think Plusnet has a lot of spare capacity at these hours now. Pretty impressive, this time last year it would definitely of been a problem

[#10]

Its so high with AOC atm due A to all the patchs, and no I'm not going to wait till after midnight to dl a mmo patch so I can continue playing, B they still have some downloading when zoning to new area's, though its much better in EA version. 
As an estimate using 50mb per hour.
Say starting on 10th as I do, for a new MMO and me working, 
weekends say 10 hours  10 weekend days in the month 10*50*10 = 5GB
Weekdays say 20, 5 hour a day, 250x 22 = 5gb
Patchs? say a couple GB a month = 2Gb
Ok so a semi avg gamer spends 12gb estimated time on just Aoc, and for a package thats aimed at gamers, this could be a very low figure, I know people and use to myself who spent far longer then this online.  So 15gb enough for aoc and normal web etc? don't think so.
In the past 10 days I've used 13Gb paid, 10Gb free  Now apart from bunch of windows updates/drivers(pc upgrade/format), a few youtube etc, AOC patchs and normal web usage, and no p2p etc.... 15gb for a month rofl .
I did use it for a month though and was really good, just 10gb cap at the time is insane and 15gb isn't much better, unless I get a 2nd connection just for gaming that is.

[#11]

Firejack -
My gaming time over the last 3 days since release (I was not in the beta) - I understand that the issue may also be due to online time.
Saturday 17th - general game issues, got on around 11.50pm - 1am BST - no real latency issues.
Sunday 18th 10pm - 12.15am BST I had a few problems around 10pm, but they disappeared after around 30 mins (spiking to 10k ms), dropped to playable after 30mins or so.
Monday 19th May - between 8pm and 10.30pm BST minimum of 5k rising to around 9800 ms pings.  Gave up at 10.30pm.
Not sure if this helps.

[#12]

So, it raises the question - if you want high speed performance at all times of the day are you willing to pay for it ?
Providing the Pro product isn't free, so if you use additional usage, then imo it should be paid for.  Then you do precisely "get what you pay for".
Plusnet have stated that the signature should be updated over the next few days.  I appreciate it's frustrating but these changes do have to go through peer review, testing and change control.
B.
EDIT:  Perhaps trying another gateway would ease your problem?  Try restarting your router (properly, from the admin interface, not by yanking the power lead out) and seeing if you can get onto a different gateway.
You can see the packet drops by gateway here

[#13]

Pay that much extra so don't have to worry about plus.net keeping traffic management updated or not as the case may be?

ps. my last router upgrade cured me of ever pulling out the cable, damn thing locks up if you do and have to wait 10 min before can get it working again.

[#14]

In this case, Plusnet are having to be reactive to changes by the game publisher.  They can't be pro-active unless the publisher notifies them in advance of any IP/protocol changes that they'll be doing... which is highly unlikely.
And I suppose in a way yes, if you want a premium, high-speed product then that should be a factor in what you are prepared to pay for it.
From the AoC forums, it seems like there are plenty of problems with Talktalk and Tiscali suffering latency.  At least with Plusnet I know these problems will be solved.
B.

[#15]

Hi Guys,
Just to let you know, we should hopefully be able to get this done sooner than Thursday.
Watch this space!