Buyer’s Guide Multiplayer gaming.

Buyer's Guide

Multiplayer gaming.

Multiplayer gaming is all the rage now a days, and this buyer's guide will help you choose the right connections and hardware to get you online and help you win. The first step towards getting into a multiplayer gaming session is to decide which game type you really want to play. First person shooters require blazingly fast internet connections, alongside equally fast computers in order to handle the graphics onslaught a typical multiplayer game ends up creating. If massively multiplayer online role-playing games (RPGs) are more your type, chances are that you would need the same set up levels. Turn-based RPGs or strategy games are less demanding of the gaming system.

Unfortunately in Pakistan, fast internet connections are either too expensiveor a rarity due to availability issues. Still, the following connections are recommended for the different forms of gaming:

1. Internet Hearts/Checkers etc: 56 kbps or above.
   
2. First-person shooters (LAN only): Cable internet or 70/100 Ethernet network.
   
3. First-person shooters (Internet only): 256 kbps DSL or above with a contention ratio 1:10.
   
4. Text-based RPGs: 56 kbps
   
5. Massively multiplayer online RPGs: 512 kbps DSL or above with a contention ratio of 1:10.
   
6. Turn. Based strategy, 128 kbps DSL or above with a contention ratio of 1:10.
   
7. Real. time strategy.128 kbps DSL or above with a contention ratio
   

   Of 1:10.
   

   Contention ration are the number of users that share a single connection bandwidth. This means that at any given time, 10 active customers might share your 256kbps connection.
   

   Through this method, ISPs control the exorbitant backend costs. This is not all bad news as this usually does not happen all at once, especially in the case of large service providers and hence you usually end up with a large chunk of the bandwidth at your disposal.
   

Almost all games download patches in the background. So, ramping up the bandwidth will almost always boost gaming experiences.

Ping times are basically the time lag it takes for a server to respond to your gaming commands. Hence, it is important, to choose a multiplayer server with low ping times or latency. If a server is highly crowded, or has a weak internet pipe, its pings will shoot up to the sky. No "Laggy". As a rule of thumb, almost all real-time games require similar pings, whereas turn-based ones have the luxury to work with pings far greater than 100ms.

Graphics cards are very important to get an edge in frenetic first-person shooter matches. The higher the resolution and detail, the better you can spot your opponent. At 640x480 the other players become garbled with the scenery, especially in "brown" heavy games such as Doom and Quake 3. the sharper your vision, the better your target will become and hence settings such as 1280x1024x32 with 4x antialiasing and 16x anisotropic filtering are highly recommended.

Once you have everything in place, logging on to the game server would require a registered copy with a registered key code. The key code ensures that the game is not a bootlegged copy, which it mostly is in the case of developing countries. If you are a LAN gamer, the key does not really matter as most games are usually designed to allow the same copy of a game to run multiplayer services on a private/offline LAN. But once on the internet, you would want a legitimate copy to log on successfully to the online gaming community.