EQ Live Lies Again to its CustomersFollow

Hi all,

Today while researching a problem I was having with EQIM(which I never found the answer to) I came across the following FAQ for EQ on eqlive's help area. here is the text:

EverQuest: Will someone with a better connection have an advantage over someone with a poor connection?

The following text was Sony's answer:
Not normally, no. Certainly having a better connection will reduce lag and some warping, but it typically won't put you at a disadvantage necessarily in terms of game play. The exception being some high level gameplay involving very large numbers of players in combat, where a lot of data is being transferred to your machine over the Internet. These cases are rare, and for normal gameplay as long as you are connecting to our servers with a 28.8 bps connection or better, your gameplay will be much the same as everyone else's. We have designed the game such that we aren't sending out more data than a 28.8 can handle. Also, we've done several things to reduce lag, including using very mature network code (descended from our Tanarus game), as well as keeping the number of people down per server, to reduce server lag.

I feel this is misleading, as a) most servers, if you do a /who all in a particular class or a /lfg and scan the levels, you will see that 65+ reign most the servers, which means that high end guild work is a huge presence. Second, when was the last time that there was a server split or allowing people to transfer their toons to a new server, to allow to thin out server capacity? Like 2.5years ago? And the game has only gotten more popular, and density has gone up. With all the improvements in the code, we are still haveing major lag issues due to the fact of too many people per server.

I also started out playing on dial-up. The only time I had a problem, it was the phone line itself. Once I got my line checked, the game (and every other online activity) was much better.

Oh, and EQIM isn't supported anymore, if that's what you were looking for.

I didn't notice much of a problem when I was stationed in England, playing on dialup. My biggest problem was that I was using AOL (yes, America OnLine, in England. Ya got me...). AOL sucks for online games. Eats up precious cpu resources and seems to have a bad ping rate. One thing... what was the date on that post? If it's from a couple of years ago, then it's completely understandable. Not as many people were playing back then and not as many were as high in level. Raiding was sometimes much more difficult without the current tools we have (for example, the raid management window) so it could be very difficult to get that many people of appropriate level to a raid. It's pretty easy to get a raid of 72 people 60+ together to kill something. It may be a new post, but either way, I'd have to agree with the other posters. It's not that HUGE of a difference.

Now I don't know what a 28.8 is like but I had to take a step down from a cable connection to a 56.6 connection a few months back. I had no issues with lag at all. I did zone slower. And as far as LD's I actually got less of them on the 56.6 the cable connection was just all screwed up which is why i switched to dialup until I could get DSL installed. So I really don't think dialup connections are at a disadvantage. Even in the bazaar the lag wasn't worse with the dialup. I was still able to play and have no issues.