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Lately Activision and Call of Duty : Modern Warfare 2 has been getting hit quite hard. First it was due to the lack of dedicated servers for PC, then all the hacking going on and then the trojans that can be sent through the game. And now some gamers are getting ISP warnings about using too much bandwidth or the ISP thinks there is a virus. Some letters are stating using that using P2P applications is not acceptable on their network. And the gamers are claiming this is all due to MW2 multiplayer. Personally I think this is all crap.
First when people call MW2 multiplayer P2P it is not the same thing as torrents. Yes they are both peer to peer in name but the underlying transfer isn't the same. P2P in gaming is just one of the players is also hosting the game on the same system. It’s the same things as dedicated servers except the host doesn't need to transfer any data to himself. Torrents have you connecting to many different computers to grab parts of a file while at the same time, many other computers are connecting to you to grab pieces of that file you already downloaded. Most torrents will have a lot more than 17 connections to your computer. ISPs while they act stupid, they don't employ stupid network administrators, they know the difference.
Talking about bandwidth overages that some people are complaining about. There could be some truth in this but I think its more overblown than anything. First Lets assume you happen to always host a full MW2 game. Lets assume MW2 uses the same amount of bandwidth as COD4 does. That would be 13kbps (kilobits per second), this is both up and down data combined. Using these numbers after one hour the host would of transferred about 105 MB (Mega Bytes). After 24 hours of playing this number goes to 2.5 GB (Giga Bytes). Ok 2.5 GB is a lot of data, but really do people play this game 24 hours in a row. I sure some people did when it first came out but now.. Probably not. But for this argument I want to see if its would be possible to use so much bandwidth to get a warning from an ISP. Lets say you played for a month (30 Days) straight with no break and you were the host for every single game you would of used 75.8 GB of data during that month.
From my research very few ISPs have that small of a bandwidth limit in the USA. Cox Cable has a 200 to 250GB cap on their plans but they rarely enforce their policy. Comcast has a 250 GB cap, and while Comcast does enforce it MW2 for a month is just 1/3 of their cap. Time Warner on the other hand… well I couldn't find any written policy on their caps. I know they were going to start with a 40GB cap but they stopped after people made a major deal about it. This doesn't mean they aren't warning people for going over the limit though. Even still to hit the 40GB limit you need to play for around 16 days straight of MW2. Granted this is possible if you play 12 hours a day ever day and you happen to be the host on every single game. It's doubtful that you are the host on every single game. Home cable internet just isn't that good in the USA. By the way for those not living in the USA these story could be true. I know in many countries the ISPs do have bandwidth caps and some of them are quite small but so far all the letters I've seen come from American cable companies if listed at all.
So doing the math and reading these letters I will have to call them bogus. Well the letters could very well be real but the reasons can't be. The users are probably also running lots of torrents on their machines, have either malware or a virus installed without them knowing or some other factor besides MW2. In fact the only thing I can see ISPs having a small leg to stand on would be terms about running a server on their service. Most don't allow this to happen and when you are the host of a P2P game you are in fact running a server. Frankly if this was a problem it would have been known a long time ago with other gamers getting these letters for different games. The 360 has been out for 4 years this problem would of poped up by now if the ISPs were concerned about servers on their network from gaming.
Lets face it, people are just trying to blame Infinity Ward and MW2 for faults just because they didn't release a dedicated server with the game. Yes this news upset me as I had plans for the game but in the end I just didn't buy it. Yes dedicated servers would help solve this problem if I truly felt it was a problem, but their isn't anything we can do about it. Infinity Ward would have released a dedicated server by now if they felt their IW.Net idea wasn't working. I think people are getting into a frenzy when anything remotely can be blamed on MW2 thinking it will fix the problem. In time this will blow over and just be a very minor speed bump in the history of PC gaming.
Let me add that I think no dedicated server is crap and I was upset with Infinity Ward for dumping them. But blaming them for something that went wrong even remotely connected to the game is pushing it to far. Look don't pay or play the game if you hate it or the developers that much. How hard can it be?
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