Monday 17 August 2015

Black Ops 3 Beta, Improving Download Speed and Throttling!!

Well hello interweb and here we are again, Monday, Urgh. I was woken this morning by the next door neighbours child screaming, apparently she has chicken pox and is not happy when the cream gets lashed on. Oh well another week of this then I guess her brother will contract the disease and we will start again.
Today I would like to share a couple of bits of information about the upcoming Black Ops 3 beta.
 If you have registered to get a token these will be e-mailed out to people on Wednesday 19th August at  12AM PST.
That converts to 08.00AM GMT. (PS4)
It has been confirmed that any progress made will not carry through to the actual game release in November and there will be no Zombies on the Beta release either.
The file is a whopping 15GB download and so I am sure many of us will be sat staring at a very slow moving download number for many hours as I am sure the servers will be flooded.
It is with this in mind that I have had a look into how we might speed up this process.
1. We could change the domain name servers that we connect to to see if that helps. 2 of the google DNS are as follows, 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4
To change this on your PS4 console press the PS button, go to settings-network-set up Internet connection-wifi or lan (lan would be better)-custom or manual (either)
then when you get to the DNS settings enter primary DNS as 8.8.8.8 and secondary as 8.8.4.4
Continue and test connection.
Another change that can be made during set up it to set your MTU setting (maximum transmission unit) to 1473 as opposed to the standard 1500. ( I have personally seen a big increase in download speed using this method myself)
I have also read that for some people simply pausing and resuming the download a few times will suddenly decrease the time remaining from many hours to minutes.
And lastly you could try putting the PS in rest mode whilst making sure that it is set to download in rest mode in the settings section. 
Power saving-set functions available in rest mode-turn on auto download. Put PS into rest mode and come back later.
Hopefully I will not be reporting about how any of these have played out on Wednesday as I will have it downloaded and be playing the game but we shall see.
The developers have also said that there will be times when the servers will be offline during the beta for maintenance / changes etc.

Now onto the thorny issue of throttling your connection to get a better game play experience, or to combat lag compensation. 
I read all the time how it should be removed from the game but if lag compensation was removed from the game you wouldn't be able to hit a damn thing, end of story so lag compensation is here and it ain't going nowhere in a hurry. 
Online gaming needs a tiny amount of bandwidth to be able to play online, less than 0.5 meg upload and maybe 1 down.
 "I have 10 gazillion download and a bazillion upload speeds, lag comp is punishing me for having good interweb man"
No it isn't. Seriously lag compensation does not work like that and throttling your connection to have low upload speed does nothing to help you or anybody else in your game lobby. 
If anything you are making the situation worse.
 Matchmaking to somebody half way around the planet, now that can cause problems but the whole lag compensation is punishing me for having good internet argument is in my humble opinion a very flawed argument. One to which I have yet to see any conclusive proof.
You see a few youtubers showing a few videos where they have a good game on a throttled connection, I would love to see an hour or two of their game play as opposed to the odd game here or there. 
I have read articles about this and spoken to developers of hardware and software devs and Pro Gamers all of which say the same as myself. 
So with that in mind I know which side or the fence I am firing up my BBQ. But if ya wanna buy into the whole throttling issue that's your right to do that. 

Peace out Yall, THE BAGSTAXXX

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