iddoublereel Posted June 5, 2012 Share Posted June 5, 2012 Hi All! I do a lot of traveling and sometimes I'm in areas with dial-up or very little internet access at all. Recently I have been put in New York City for the next four months and don't have access to wireless. I am considering getting a Verizon MiFi so that I can play with my boyfriend while I am on the road, however, I am curious about how much data I will use while in game. Meaning, how quickly will I reach my monthly data limit just by playing? Does anyone else use a MiFi or something similar to play and could offer some input? I am able to get to coffee shops and download big game updates so those shouldn't eat into the MiFi data limit. Thanks so much! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Morningbob Posted June 6, 2012 Share Posted June 6, 2012 I have at&t, not Verizon. However I play a good bit through my phone as a hot spot. Ithe quality is good enough to play though I have not tried wz's. I have a 4 gig plan and have never gone over. Most I think I have used with gaming and music mixed is 2.5 gig. That's with 4-6 hours a week gaming and 10-11 hours a week music. So it's doable. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Halkyon Posted June 6, 2012 Share Posted June 6, 2012 (edited) I played this game over dial-up from December to March, so I think mifi would be very playable, as long as you get a stable connection. SWTOR uses very little bandwidth outside of patch. I just made sure my move queue was set to 1.0 seconds so I could have a little wiggle room in queueing up skill combos (dial-up ping averaged around 300ish and was very playable--only really spiked in large warzones and the fleet, but mostly during the initial load). Mifi dodges the bandwidth bullet that hurts dial-up's initial area loads/patching, so I'd expect you could play over it with a ping of 300-600ish, which should be very playable. To give you an idea of how much data SWTOR uses on average, running around questing on a planet typically only takes an average of 4KB/sec or so... that is, it doesn't even tie up the entire bandwidth for a 56k modem with a decent phone line. It spikes to 30-60KB/sec or so when loading areas like the fleet where you've literally got hundreds of players to track, at times, but the game is amazingly lenient and will let you lag like crazy for a bit while everything loads in, after which it's back to normal. Given that bandwidth was a premium while I was on dial-up I used task Manager's Resource Monitor to watch bandwidth use like a hawk and axe anything that wasn't SWTOR. If you're curious and on win7/vista, you can use ctrl-alt-del and go to task manager, then the performance tab and click the resource monitor button at the bottom; the network tab within that will give you a detailed view of just how much bandwidth each application you're running is taking up. It's actually one of the things I really, really like about SWTOR compared to WoW, it's probably one of the friendliest games to low bandwidth connections that's on the market right now. In other words, you'll barely even dent your data limit just by playing; major patches are what you want to watch out for. 5 minutes on youtube is essentially equivalent to an entire night of playing... if not 2-3 nights. I strongly suspect you have more to worry about from incidental stuff like windows update or youtube/music streaming than you do from SWTOR's connection. Edited June 6, 2012 by Halkyon Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Asacado Posted June 6, 2012 Share Posted June 6, 2012 Coming from someone who has unreliable internet once a month, IE comcast. I have and use a verizon Mifi and it works quite well. Verizon's 4G LTE is as fast if not faster than my broadband speeds. When I am in pvp, I see 46-56 ms on my cable internet and using the Mifi, I get 60-156ms. All things considered, there is no significant lag. It works fine as long as your device is kept cool, has a good signal and you consider that 3 hours of gameplay is roughly 30mb of data usage. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
iddoublereel Posted June 6, 2012 Author Share Posted June 6, 2012 (edited) This is all very helpful. Thank you! Sounds like it will work out just fine. I would likely only be using the mifi for SWTOR and for the occasional Skype call. I would probably be playing about 9 hours/week. That should also leave a little time left over if I wanted to watch something off of my netflix, right? Edited June 6, 2012 by iddoublereel Adding Info Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Asacado Posted June 6, 2012 Share Posted June 6, 2012 This is all very helpful. Thank you! Sounds like it will work out just fine. No problem, but as a last note for your mifi, Keep it cool. It can and will run very hot over extended periods of time. But I am sure you know this. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts