Everquest on airplane wifi

Discussion in 'Time Locked Progression Servers' started by 6rout, May 9, 2019.

  1. 6rout Lorekeeper

    Anyone ever tried it? I know EQ is pretty low footprint in terms of data transmission, I'm just wondering if there's a lot of packetloss or interrupted connection that would lead to rubberbanding, frequent disconnects, etc.
  2. Captain Video Augur

    Your signal from the plane is bouncing off a satellite. The latency would be prohibitive. Streaming can work OK because of buffering.
  3. Morgen Elder

    I have done it, even raided on a plane. It's not that bad to be honest.
    Aegir and Xyroff-cazic. like this.
  4. RandomStrategy Augur

    Average speed of satellite internet is 25k/sec. That's five times faster than what people were playing on in 1999.

    It'll be a true classic experience!
  5. Aegir Augur

    I had some Internet issues lately and didn't convert my phone subscribtion to free data fast enough before it was too late. This meant I would go down to 28kb/s for playing EverQuest (Have to bypass launcher though!) for a couple of days.

    It did the job just fine. Just make sure you disable any ghost apps that uses your bandwith and disable all auto-update stuff.
  6. jeskola pheerie

    [IMG]
    [IMG]
  7. Meredyth Augur

    I have also done it. It’s possible but you might have some situations where the guild has killed the raid target and is taking tells on loot, even though on your client the raid target is still at 37%....
  8. That0neguy Augur

    I've done it multiple times as well. The only issue can be latency but the highest I've seen is like 1sec. Which can be dealt with pretty easily.
    BlueberryWerewolf likes this.
  9. Boze TLP complaint factory

    I want to see someone buy out a row of seats to truebox a group on a plane.
    Moldar, Accipiter and jeskola like this.
  10. Spayce Augur

    I've had it work, and I've had it not work. When it works I usually have pings well under 1000ms. As long as you are over the continental US, it should be fine-ish. It's definitely worth the ~$6 wifi fee to give it a shot if you don't have anything else to do on a long flight.

    Folks claiming there will be terrible lag are clueless, and I have no idea why ignorant people chime in as if they have anything useful to contribute.
  11. jeskola pheerie

    @silinius
  12. Captain Video Augur


    Any competent network engineer will tell you that ping time is a one-shot sample, whereas latency is a sustained (and measurable) average packet delay rate. If you're flying a local commuter near major metropolitan areas and can get sustained latency under 1s, then more power to you, but that's not going to be the average experience, especially not on cross-country flights in the US, and especially not in many other parts of the world. I would describe the experience as "prohibitive" when my screen shows the raid boss at 37% and the rest of the guild is divvying up the loot.

    One of us has worked in IT for an air-to-ground phone vendor, and somehow I don't think it's you. :)
  13. That0neguy Augur

    I've probably raided 20+ times from a place in the last year. I have never had an experience where you are describing. So guessing something else is coming into play for you. Flow from NY to LA. Den to Salt Lake. SFO to Portland without anything worse then a 1sec delay.
  14. modsiw Augur


    Depending on context, latency refers to either the aggregate measurement (a low latency route, a low latency device, a low latency rule) or a single measurement (connection timed out because of latency, packets arrived out of order because the 3rd one hit some latency).

    I love me a good ad hominem argument. You worked for a vendor? That's cool. I worked as an engineer at the company that built the equipment that powers the vast majority of the internet and corporate networks. I was a software engineer at Cisco for a touch over 3 years building IDS/IPS systems. I was heavily customer facing during betas and spoke with high level network engineers from many Fortune 500s and ISPs. With IDS/IPS latency is always a chief concern.

    Now, since you enjoy being pedantic, let's dissect your statement. Ordinarily, no one would ever do this unless the distinctions mattered in context, but since you seem to enjoy it, I'll play.

    - Latency isn't a rate. Bandwidth is, but latency is not.
    - Latency within a network can apply when there are no packets. You simply have to look at sufficiently low levels in the OSI stack or use protocols which don't have packets.
    - Ping time, from the perspective of a network engineer, is technically a meaningless* statement as ping is nothing more than the name of an application. This statement is only meaningful when understood with assumptions. "ICMP echo request round trip time" is what you're looking for. Network engineers (generally) care more about TCP latency than ICMP; thus, ping isn't the most useful tool.
    - Latency is often looked at in a single direction, not round trip. This is especially so when the network in question is meaningfully asymmetrical, such as air to ground and satellite.


    * Put a bit of time between the STOP and CONT signals:
    ping google.com >ping.out &
    kill -STOP %%
    kill -CONT %%
    kill %%

    Look at the "ping times" in ping.out. See those spikes? Don't confuse the application sending and interpreting the traffic with the traffic itself.
  15. Captain Video Augur

    I have never worked for Cisco. I did once have dinner with Vint Cerf at an Interop conference in San Jose. But then I'm an old warhorse whose professional tenure goes all the way back to the Arpanet days and before.

    To play EQ from space, you have to send data between the ground and space. Despite the marketing hype from the airlines, there isn't really a WiFi-frequency signal going from the plane to the ground and back, it doesn't reach that far. The WiFi at your seat is talking to a router elsewhere in the plane, which is in turn talking to a satellite transponder. That's the piece of the signal path that constrains your available bandwidth, it's slow. Very slow. All the nomenclature babble is irrelevant.

    If anyone reading this is a frequent flyer and wants to check it out, by all means go for it. My prediction is you will AT BEST see a lot of rubber-banding, and it won't prove to be worth the trouble. Others are free to make their own best guesses.
  16. Spayce Augur

    Your explanation doesn't match my experiences at all. I've played EQ several times on domestic flights, and only had issues on flights to Mexico. The eye rolls from my wife as I played EQ on the plane during vacations are all the proof I need. They obviously weren't the most responsive gaming experiences I've ever had, but I was able to play and get get things done in game just fine.

    But hey, if a guy on the internet claims to be an expert, better listen to him!

    Or...spend the $6 and try it for yourself. When it works, like it has for me several times, you can make your own assessment.
  17. That0neguy Augur

    Man you better tell companies like gogo that they cant do that! https://www.gogoair.com/commercial/inflight-systems/next-generation-atg/
    You obviously are out of your element here. As a consumer you can tell a big difference between ground vs satellite internet while flying. Can't quite see the little latency bar in this photo. Have fone this many times and never had any rubber banding or other issues.

    [IMG]
  18. Spayce Augur


    It doesn't matter what actually happened in your experiences.

    All that matters is what the guy on the internet who claims to be an expert claims will happen.
  19. Spayce Augur

    I was told by a self proclaimed expert on the internet that this was impossible.

    What gives???
  20. modsiw Augur

    That's ok. You're not incorrectly calling someone else wrong over meaningless detail in terminology so you can brag about junk credentials, so you're cool in my book.

    Oh wait. You're the same dude.