Rage of Conan

Finally seduced into the world of Massively-Multiplayer Online games, which use a subscription based model of monthly payments, I settled on the “M” rated actioner. Conan has long been a favorite character of mine and the initial previews and reviews of the game were generally positive. I liked that the initial levels of the game would in fact be single player, giving the player an opportunity to get comfortable with the control and gameplay before throwing them into the online world.
Throughout the initial offline aspect of the game I was hooked and delighted-unlike the more stylized but attractive World of Warcraft AOC is a deeply textured and beautiful looking game. The real-time combat takes some getting used but once combos are mastered, there is a singular joy in finishing a foe with a fatality, a scripted kill sequence that can result in decapitations among other bloody delights. By taking the standard sword and sorcery play and embedding it into a harsh graphically violent world, it lives up to the expectation of the Conan brand. Online, the bread and butter of the game, is where the trouble began.
Once finished the single-player aspect of the game, online is the only alternative as several massive worlds are opened up to the player. I immediately suffered massive game stopping lag on a constant basis. Strangely enough it was very similar to the delays and issues I would have with p2p downloads using my cable provider Shaw. Shaw is well known, as is Rogers cable, for their extremely invasive throttling and packet inspection methods in order to free up bandwidth for their cable, VOD and VOIP services.
Several weeks of contact with both Shaw’s tech support as well as the game publisher Funcom were unable to rectify the problem, and I cancelled my account, disappointed.
In the middle of this I also started the switch from cable to my preferred DSL reseller Teksavvy. As I use them in Ontario and have been very pleased I was extremely disappointed about the 3 week odyssey to setup internet on my phone line. True to form, Telus did as Shaw, Rogers and Bell have done before, and screwed up the install. Only by checking my own phone line with a multimeter at both the jack and the patch board in the building’s utility room was I able to finally get a Telus tech out to the building. Once there it was clear that Telus had provided faulty information to Teksavvy about my DSL line, and the service was being sent to the wrong unit. Within an hour it was all corrected and I finally logged into my new internet.
During these events I made it clear to all involved that the latency issue with AOC, in my mind, was very much due to the throttling practices of my ISP. I measured throughput during gameplay and my speed’s never reached higher than 6 kb/s, far below what it would take to keep my client software in sync with the server generated world. Neither Shaw nor Funcom would address this issue.
As a test I initiated a bittorrent download on my new DSL line and was delighted to see speeds between 5 and 10 times faster than the throttled cable. Invigorated I reactivated AOC and re-entered the game world, wondering if I would continue to lag out.
Then I played for 3 hours without a hiccup. It’s clear that throttling is the single source of the issues I experienced with the game and this poses a larger question. Creating and maintaining an MMO is a hugely expensive undertaking. In a world where Net Neutrality is becoming more of an issue, the very fact of throttling could be the thing that prevents a game from reaching sustainability much less success. This leaves the developer, publisher and customer at the mercy of their ISP, which is absolutely unacceptable.
Happily I have leveled up from 24 to 32 in the last week 