Guild Wars 2

Just curious to see if anyone out there can tell me how the game functions when connected by satellite internet services. I’m moving into a very rural area where cable and DSL is not an option.

It depends of your ISP.
Where I work one of our internet lines uses a radio connection, it is just 4MB but the latency is very stable and we never had a downtime larger than 10 minutes, and it only happened 2 times in 5 years.

Until you can run some latency tests on the Equipment, nobody can really tell you.

I’d be more worried about the potential for the ISP to throttle your connection (that can cause lag and connection issues) since actual satellite bandwith has to cost a fortune compared to renting fiber from a backbone provider.

Are there any local ISP’s where you’re going? A lot of rural areas have wireless broadband/dsl which is (near) LOS radio (2.4/5ghz) internet. It’s what I have at home and works pretty well. Biggest bottleneck for me is the upload speeds at 3Mbps. My download is 15Mbps and when I speed test I’m almost always hitting an average of 20-22Mbps. As far as latency my average ping to GW2 servers is right around 65ms but sometimes spikes closer to 90ms.

I don’t think I could game on satellite. There’s a guy in one of my guilds who runs on it and I think he said his average ping is around 180-200ms. He’s always rubber banding and desyncing all over the place. His TS is always garbled. I don’t know how he does it to be honest.

By rural, I mean I’ll be living on basically farmland on the outskirts of a town with a population of approximately 1,000. The nearest “big” town is seven miles away. It has a whopping 5,000 population. Then, Id’ have to travel 45 minutes to get to what would be deemed a properly sized town.

I’m not sure if there is a local ISP or not. Haven’t checked into it enough with everything else that I have to do to get moved in.

If memory serves correctly, the guy that hooked up the dish said I’ll be getting a guaranteed 1 Mbps download speed with a potential of up to 6 mbps. It’s not much at all, which is why I asked the question in the first place.

Upload is faster than the download? Interesting …

Anyway, you’ll have an ISP for sure, maybe not a local one, but some company will “own” the internet you’ll be using and that will be your ISP.

Also, internet speed doesn’t make much difference since the game packets are small, what makes the difference is the latency, the “ping” value.

I play via satellite connection, and I have no problems except the very occasional drop out due to weather. I can play pvp fine and get no lag at world bosses/in pvp/wvw.

Thankfully we live in an age where data transfers are highly optimised, you do not need a very high-speed connection at all to experience client based MMO’s well (Most MMORPG’s go through only 5~30 kb/s depending on activity).

Ping is more important than speed, and I get a 100~150ms ping connecting from the UK to the NA servers, so I expect you’ll be perfectly fine

I have a friend who was restricted to satellite for years. She got very good at healing in WoW dungeons when she couldn’t even tell where anything or anyone was because her frame rate was single digits and her lag astronomical. GW2 had similar issues for her.

Recently a bunch of friends pooled together and bought her Verizon Wireless. She’s been ecstatic about the difference. Now I can’t grab her for RP because she’s reveling in so many dungeons and raids her time is gone …

Anyway, a wireless connection might be an option for you if satellite turns out to be as bad as it was for her.

There is not much of a connection where my other half and I go most of the time (we live full time in an RV). So we have kept the unlimited data on our Verizon phones. 99% of the time we have a awesome Wi-Fi connection thru them. Sometimes we use only 5gb a month but lately we have used around 50gb a month or so between the 2 of us. He uses his connection for intranet stuff, gaming and work while I use mine for the intranet and gaming.