Data usage while playing LOTRO

[Hansbaumann]

Hello everyone, I was wondering if anyone would be able to give some information regarding how much data is used when playing LOTRO. I am not sure if it is dependent on what area of the game one is playing in, however I wouldn't think that there would be a large amount of upload/download data usage. I understand some other games will be somewhere in the range of 50 MB per hour while others can reach 1 GB per hour. I ask this question as my data usage has easily tripled/quadrupled and I have been playing LOTRO for over a year without any prior concern. My usage in September was under 10 GB and I played LOTRO for a good 60 hrs that month. In October, my gameplay did not change, but my usage went up to 40 GB. Apparently, I have used 9 GB in the last 4 days, with 2 GB of that occuring after a few hours yesterday.

The online gaming is a bit of a wildcard for me and most other users are better versed than I.

Thanks in advance for any information provided as I try to figure out what is going on.

[PsychoChicken]

Make sure that Pando Media Booster is either disabled or uninstalled. You do need it to download the game (unless you are using steam). Once installed though, it seeds other installs using your bandwidth and saving Turbines. The spike in October could have been from people downloading the beta client, and another in mid november for the updated HD client.

[Hansbaumann]

So I checked my data usage before playing yesterday and then after playing. It seems that in just over 2 hrs of playing, my data went up by more than 2 GB. Now here is where it gets kind of odd, my network connection indicates that I have only downloaded 500 MB in the last few days while uploading 90 MB in that same time. My ISP monitor from their website indicates almost 12 GB in that same time, but the past two 2-3 GB spikes have been associated with LOTRO playing. I do not have PANDO anywhere that I can see but from my computer's network connection, it doesn't seem that there would be anything burning through the data....500 MB is very different than 12 GB. Yes, other devices connect to my network, but same thing with little data being used...no movies/netflix and limited streaming (youtube). Even the various data usage calculators, using generous numbers, do not give me data usage remotely close to my ISP.
For the more techie folks out there that understand these connections better, being that I run a wireless connection (out of necessity due to being rural and no access to anything else), what are the chances I am correct with my data usage and the ISP is as well? I say this with the understanding that there can be packet loss and data being resent.
For the record, I don't have the option of unlimited data and even if I went to the top level of data limit (60 GB) for $100/mth, it appears I would still be exceeding it.
Any other suggestions for me?
Thanks again.

[Bungomungo]

How many other people are using the internet in your home? Also, you say you are on wireless, are you sure your network is secure and no neighbours are using it or anything like that?

My money would be on family members downloading or someone stealing your wireless from outside your home.

[Hansbaumann]

I live rural so the likelihood of any 'stealing' is highly unlikely, although never 100% discounted. My 'wireless' connection is more referring to my main microwave (Wimax)signal that I receive from a tower 20 miles away and my 'radio' receives this signal, which can be impeded by various things such as line of sight problems, excessive humidity in the air, etc. Signal quality is not the greatest and there is the question of how much packet loss I get. Although correlation does not equal causation, the last two times I have been on LOTRO, my ISP says I have used large amounts of data whereas my computer and router do not back this up. This is why I was wondering about whether my ISP might actually be accurate with information from the game being sent and resent, but with me not actually receiving a good portion of this data. Again, I am no expert, but the basics have been pretty much eliminated with respect to other users/computers/etc.
Thanks.

[Bungomungo]

That's pretty odd then. I'm in the UK so have a slightly different setup and if security isn't set on your router in your house, other people can access it. Doesn't sound like that's the case with you.

If it was me, my next step would be to contact my ISP and have them confirm what the data usage is all about. Good luck getting to the bottom of it.

[Hansbaumann]

Security would be an issue here as well, but since my network wifi is locked down, the likelihood of having my router hacked is pretty slim. If it were not locked down, then feasibly, anyone with a wifi connection could access it...but my wifi signal is pretty weak...works great within about 100 feet of the router but after that not so good. Locked down none the less.
ISP says their method of monitoring data usage is accurate and says that all third-party monitoring is flawed because they do not pick up many things. I might agree, except to have a greater than 2000% difference in data usage measurements makes me think something else is going on.

[Hansbaumann]

Also wanted to say after discussing with my ISP, they indicated that their data is updated real time and that yesterday I used 3 GB on Youtube. I responded that I noticed 3 GB of change after gaming...and I had not been on Youtube, so not sure if the gaming is interpreted as Youtube and if so, is the data handled differently? They are going to get back to me.

[Nosdracir]

Also wanted to say after discussing with my ISP, they indicated that their data is updated real time and that yesterday I used 3 GB on Youtube. I responded that I noticed 3 GB of change after gaming...and I had not been on Youtube, so not sure if the gaming is interpreted as Youtube and if so, is the data handled differently? They are going to get back to me.

They would have said YouTube based on the end point URL or IP address for the traffic. If that traffic had been LOTRO, the tech would have told you it went to Turbine unless they happened to know LOTRO, DDO, AC1, etc. and could personally identify which Turbine game.

[Lynx3d]

Not sure I understand you correctly, your router also monitors traffic to/from your ISP, and those ominous gigabytes of traffic do not show up there either?
In that case, I'd say your ISP is shafting you big time. There's no way traffic bypasses your router, unless your ISP allows multiple concurrent connections on one contract and someone else surfs on your bill, which I really doubt. But I have no idea how WiMAX gets handled typically.

Also, there's no way the Lotro client itself transfers several GB in a few hours. From the pure transfer rates, you could easily play it on dialup/ISDN really, only larger spikes are character logins, where ~1-3MB are loaded.
So if this traffic really exists while playing, the only explanation would be Pando (PMB.exe). Not sure how this Happy Cloud version works, I think it's supposed to save all downloads so eventually you have a full client and can uninstall it, but I never tried it. Though neither should make your ISP tell you the traffic was from youtube.

[LagunaD]

Some websites may have embedded video that buffers (i.e. downloads) when the page loads without your actually hitting any play button (presumably so that if you *do* hit play, you will be able to watch the video smoothly). I have seen this happen in the past (it was an ad for some game; I don't remember which), although not recently.

If you're sure nobody else in your household was using the network, you could probably set your router and/or firewall to block YouTube as an experiment.

[Tenuke]

And u said you live in rural areas so that it would unlikely that some outsider is using your wlan..

But do you have neighbours living anywhere nearby? Someone could really accidentally use your connection, or just because they wouldnt know better that it shouldnt be done :-)
If you do not need WLAN yourself, disable it from the router or set/change the password for it if you need to have it enabled.

My cellphone uses my WLAN when Im home, do you have anyone there having a cell or anything which could also use the WLAN?

edit: ok, read a bit better. So your router does not show the traffic been happening at all what your ISP says there has been happening.. ummh, I dont know how/why your router could be wrong or what the heck would be the case here.
I certainly hope your ISP could and would actually want to investigate this further.


Hmmmm... Should you maybe try to like shutdown your router for 1 full day atleast, and then ask your ISP if they have measured some traffic for you for that day =)

[Hajsza]

Hello everyone. After I've read your problem Hansbaumann I did some measurements at home. I have a program called CFOS installed on my computer which can display the network usage of the processes, separately for each IP : port pairs. I am away from home now, but if I don't forget, I'll do some measurements today afternoon (I'm in the GMT+2 timezone) as well and show the exact numbers. At the moment I can only give a somewhat rough number: the network usage was a few megabytes per hour in magnitude, mostly as received data packets.

About the measurement environment:
- I started the game through the Steam client, but I don't think it makes a difference.
- The server I played on was Eldar
- My characters are low level - the highest is level 45 , so the areas I were playing on were not very populated (I guess the number of players around you may increase the bandwidth usage). I went to the winter festival for 20-30 minutes as well, there was a little more player activity.
- I played mostly solo and duo with my nephew on SoA maps, not a single group content, neither big battles.

[Hajsza]

I've made the new measurements I promised. First I went to the festival place, here is the result:



For security reasons I cleared most part of the IP addresses, just left a little from the LOTRO server IP. Though I pressed 'program' on the header to order the lines by program name, still there were two other lines between the lotroclient datas, I've cleared those too.
Analyzing the data it is clear that the only significant traffic was going through the 9001 port. 644 + 2524 KB data went through over 19 minutes and 43 seconds which means a 2742 bytes/sec average bandwidth usage.

After leaving the festival I ran a "Trouble in Tuckbrough" solo skirmish. I experienced that a new connection was created for this session (the other data line disappeared which means I was not connected to that IP : port pair anymore) with a different IP number and port - I guess this is because of the load balance of the servers. My measurement is:



The skirmish took 13 minutes and 20 seconds and transmitted 474 + 2254 KB data (2728 KB total). This corresponds to a total of 3491 bytes/sec average bandwidth usage. If I use this number to calculate a 60 hour session I got that 754 MB will be used up over the time. Even if you are usually playing in more populated areas I don't think the bandwith usage would be more than 2-5 times of this result, which is still less than 5GB.

Conclusion: I think the bandwidth usage of Lotro is not that high, some other program(s) may use up that significant bandwith you experienced in October.

[Insolence]

I think we may see more of these threads concerning data usage in the near future, given the inclination of certain ISPs placing caps on total monthly data usage. ISPs such as Comcast have placed a 250GB monthly soft cap on all internet speed tiers (in some areas) with the option to pay extra for more GB. I believe AT&T has a similar cap. For those of us that stream regularly from Netflix and so forth, keeping track of total usage will become necessary, I think.

[Nosdracir]

I think we may see more of these threads concerning data usage in the near future, given the inclination of certain ISPs placing caps on total monthly data usage. ISPs such as Comcast have placed a 250GB monthly soft cap on all internet speed tiers (in some areas) with the option to pay extra for more GB. I believe AT&T has a similar cap. For those of us that stream regularly from Netflix and so forth, keeping track of total usage will become necessary, I think.

I've got Comcast. In my area (Boston) the 250 GB limit is the point at which they start to throttle the speed (from norm of approx 60 MB/sec down and 10 MB/sec up). I play LOTRO about 2 hours per day. Don't come near the limit unless my wife goes crazy with streaming video during the same month.

[manstan]

Hello everyone, I was wondering if anyone would be able to give some information regarding how much data is used when playing LOTRO. I am not sure if it is dependent on what area of the game one is playing in, however I wouldn't think that there would be a large amount of upload/download data usage. I understand some other games will be somewhere in the range of 50 MB per hour while others can reach 1 GB per hour. I ask this question as my data usage has easily tripled/quadrupled and I have been playing LOTRO for over a year without any prior concern. My usage in September was under 10 GB and I played LOTRO for a good 60 hrs that month. In October, my gameplay did not change, but my usage went up to 40 GB. Apparently, I have used 9 GB in the last 4 days, with 2 GB of that occuring after a few hours yesterday.

The online gaming is a bit of a wildcard for me and most other users are better versed than I.

Thanks in advance for any information provided as I try to figure out what is going on.

Make sure that Pando Media Booster is either disabled or uninstalled. You do need it to download the game (unless you are using steam). Once installed though, it seeds other installs using your bandwidth and saving Turbines. The spike in October could have been from people downloading the beta client, and another in mid november for the updated HD client.

How did you download LOTRO?

The numbers you are reporting is what I would expect with pandro running.

[wilfrido]

I tethered my laptop to my mobile phone using a 4g data plan. I did a 6 man Pelargir and Helms DIke. Total time spent was 2 hours and 15 minutes. Total data used was 65.5 MB. Not bad at 30 MB an hour. Got my client 3 years ago with Pando but removed it after installing the game.

[Gandolf_TheOld]

Umm, hate to be the one to inform you Wilfrido, but the last post before yours in this thread was over a year ago.