BT Throttling - Killing new MMO game...

It seems that BT's over zealous throttling has caused quite a stir amongst the online gaming fraternity!

Rift a massively multiplayer online game is currently in it's open beta phase, with it's headstart program starting on the 24th Feb. Unfortunately for those players wishing to participate, or even play when the game goes live (if a solution isn't found) but use BT Broadband may find themselves having extreme difficulties between the hours of 16:00 and 23:00 (ish)

On day one of the open beta hundreds of participants were reporting extreme latency problems and an unplayable game. With ping times in the 100,000+ ms range. However those problems appeared to rectify themselves at 23:00.

Day 2, and the same problems are apparent despite numerous complaints of both the game's official forums and the BT care forums. People are wondering if this again is going to fix itself at 23:00, my bet is on yes it will!

http://forums.riftgame.com/showthread.php?67835-Cant...
http://community.bt.com/t5/BB-in-Home/Problems-with-...

Edited by swampster (Thu 17-Feb-11 00:04:53)

Somewhat divided opinion though, on who is to blame rift website.

http://forums.riftgame.com/showthread.php?67796-Late...

I think you'll find the overwhelming consensus is that it is BT that is at fault..

While it is in the capability of Trion to fix the problem no doubt.. the fact remains there should be no legitimate reason for BT to be throttling this game simply because of the ports that it uses!

Oh and just to point out... it did miraculously just fix itself again, in pretty much exactly the same time as last night. 150K ms pings one minute... 47 ms the next, and stable. It's poorly implemented traffic shaping pure and simple!

Edited by swampster (Thu 17-Feb-11 00:38:30)

i used toplay an mmo calledage of conan and this had simialr issues when i escaleted this up the food chain it turned out that the way the data sent a recived on MMo's is slightly different to ordinary gamming took the tier 2 guys a couple of weeks and one lucky chap got the game bought for him and a subscription paid for so he could identify the issue and feed the infrmation back to the network monitoring chaps, would suggest an email to bt care and ask them to send to relevant people & bt care dont send to normal thd this needs to go to tier 2 thd

I think it's been sorted.. BT Tech's implemented some kind of fix on Friday night, and it seemed to work... though it was close to the usual shaping cut-off time, so the proof of the pudding will be in the morning as they routinely shape from 9am.

In reference to forums.riftgame.com/showthread.php?67835-Cant-play-Rift-with-BT-int...:

Quote Originally Posted by Hartsman View Post
BT customers -- The BT engineers have made some updates on their end.

Can you please try again with logins as of now (around 22:38 GMT) and reply here with whether or not the experience has improved?

and the 'official announcement'..

In reference to forums.riftgame.com/showthread.php?72207-Resolution-on-BT-Internet-...:

Resolution on BT Internet Issues

As we’ve mentioned in a couple other threads today, resolving the traffic issues that our BT Internet users were having while playing RIFT was a large, company-wide priority for us.

Trion worked directly today with much of the senior technical personnel at BT to resolve this problem for our mutual customers. BT’s team and senior management were very responsive (helping us out late Friday night their time) and they were equally concerned about their customers’ experience. They eagerly collaborated with Trion’s engineers and Operations team to resolve this issue as quickly as possible.

We will continue to pursue similar issues with other Internet Providers worldwide as they appear, to ensure that everyone across the globe has an excellent of an experience playing RIFT as we can possibly provide.

Thank you all for sticking through this with us. We appreciate all of your reports, your testing help, and your patience.

We will continue to keep an eye out over the weekend (and thereafter) to ensure that this issue is put to bed for good. Please do let us know of your experiences.

So fingers crossed for the morning, and all will be good in the world