Lack of dedicated game servers in India, How and what it affects? and What can be done about it?
- Thread starter Kaching999
- Start date
Even with low ping though, the net (land fiber) is so flaky and inconsistent that it takes next level skills to accommodate for the random lag spikes. On the flip side, it's like learning to drive in India.. going nearly anywhere in the west means you have unmatched skills 
Have tried Jio fiber, Airtel fiber, two local smaller re-sellers.. all the same lack of reliability and random lag spikes or bandwidth drops. Some better than others but none at any acceptable level at all comparable to anywhere visited in west. If anyone has any experience with leased lines ...might go that route if its actually better. Tired of every service here always claiming to be DE BAST but always turning out to be a mediocre disappointment.
Have tried Jio fiber, Airtel fiber, two local smaller re-sellers.. all the same lack of reliability and random lag spikes or bandwidth drops. Some better than others but none at any acceptable level at all comparable to anywhere visited in west. If anyone has any experience with leased lines ...might go that route if its actually better. Tired of every service here always claiming to be DE BAST but always turning out to be a mediocre disappointment.
KAKAN
Forerunner
I'd suggest to look for local ISPs with Tata and Airtel peering. Alliance worked very well here, and has options for lease line too.Even with low ping though, the net (land fiber) is so flaky and inconsistent that it takes next level skills to accommodate for the random lag spikes. On the flip side, it's like learning to drive in India.. going nearly anywhere in the west means you have unmatched skills
Also, for most spike lags, your router and a thing called bufferbloat is to blame. The easiest way to solve it is to limit your network speed to around 80% of the average internet speed you get...
Thanks! That's helpful. I'll look into the ISPs again. Had basically given up after so much hassle, but good to have some direction. And def thanks for tip regarding router/bufferbloat. Not much of a networking type but know enough to realize I've overlooked a huge potential source of issue -- the router. Feeling dumb, but still happy for having learned and having a chance at fixing this
Kaching999
Galvanizer
that's very expensive, hats off to you man if you run a public server on a lease line
Husky
Contributor
I bet you had a good PC to host! Mine was so bad that I could not run the GTA SAN game in high settings, let alone host a server. Were you by any chance associated with Indian Ocean RP? Could you drop some names of the servers that you used to host? I'd love to see if there any names that's familiar to me. I mostly played in roleplay servers, particularly LSRP and RCRP.
KAKAN
Forerunner
Hey, for the bufferbloat, you can do a test here: https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloatThanks! That's helpful. I'll look into the ISPs again. Had basically given up after so much hassle, but good to have some direction. And def thanks for tip regarding router/bufferbloat. Not much of a networking type but know enough to realize I've overlooked a huge potential source of issue -- the router. Feeling dumb, but still happy for having learned and having a chance at fixing this
I'd also recommend search IBF -- Indian Broadband Forum. It's still active and lots of issues get discussed and resolved there. Also, you don't need to learn much of networking
Also, nothing to feel dumb. This is how we learn, after all!
I'm glad to have potentially helped someone suffering from a similar fate
Haha, my first SAMP server (named Funboys. Oh god, that's cringe.) was not very popular
The second server was named Gboyz, also very cringe. But I was a kid. AAAAA
My most popular server was named Vulcan on both SAMP and MTA:SA (averaging around 200 players a day, mostly Indians and Pakis, how wild.)
Afterwards, my SAMP servers became private and invite-only since hacking in SAMP got out of control. Not sure of the exact timeline, though. Invitations got automated and much easier once Discord's API/SSO became public xd
And... no, I wasn't associated with Indian Ocean RP.
My favourite tidbits were having Russians on the server and on the voice chat (we used to host a Mumble server as well. Not TS3 tho, we hated it). All of them were so friendly, and so very unlike the CS Russian players haha
Some of them knew English, and we kept one around as a translator, and we had so much fun together. Ahh, good memories
The prices didn't matter since others took care of it. We still paid the normal prices for our home internet.
Yes, game servers were not hosted on our home internet. At peak, we had 3 Internet connections to our house
It was also so much easier to test and develop on the same machine where servers are being hosted. I miss those days.
In case of SAMP and VCMP servers, they don't run the whole game and instead act kind of like a proxy with some object detection capability. So, running the server was possible on limited hardware
My servers were hosted on a Core 2 Duo PC for multiple years before switching to an i3 4th gen CPU. We started with Windows, but quickly switched to Linux since Windows had memory leaks and trouble staying up for over 200 days or so. The current Linux server got restarted around 44 weeks back, for system updates.
First of all, no publisher will be interested to deploy a server if there's no positive RoI, viz. financially. This has been attempted in the past with Valve, and I don't know why or what happened but that too seems to have gone. This is despite a huge number of players and financial spending in-game by those players.
Secondly, I suggest that news piece like this is taken with a grain of salt. Gaming is booming in India, it's true as will be evident from the number of "gamers" in the country. But regarding this specific news, the source didn't show any breakdown of the particulars. So mostly likely they are referring to mobile gamers. There are a lot of PvP gamers, should be multiple-fold of PC and console users. Heck even kids as young as 7-8yo play fps games on their parents phones. So when it comes to PvP titles, they would be Mobile Legends, Free Fire and PUBG, and maybe BGMI. Other online games like Minecraft and Roblox too should have their own share of a huge playerbase. So if it's about spending money then it would be Mobile Legends first and foremost and then PUBG/Free Fire which rake in the most money in terms of in-game spendings. Heck even my younger brother and especially my cousin have spend tens of thousands on skins and what not years ago. If the publishers of these titles don't bother about giving dedicated servers for India then I highly doubt that others will.
Lol just came across this
Edit: seems like claim of "life savings" was exaggerated. https://www.reddit.com/r/IndianGaming/s/QDtK2NKOSu
Secondly, I suggest that news piece like this is taken with a grain of salt. Gaming is booming in India, it's true as will be evident from the number of "gamers" in the country. But regarding this specific news, the source didn't show any breakdown of the particulars. So mostly likely they are referring to mobile gamers. There are a lot of PvP gamers, should be multiple-fold of PC and console users. Heck even kids as young as 7-8yo play fps games on their parents phones. So when it comes to PvP titles, they would be Mobile Legends, Free Fire and PUBG, and maybe BGMI. Other online games like Minecraft and Roblox too should have their own share of a huge playerbase. So if it's about spending money then it would be Mobile Legends first and foremost and then PUBG/Free Fire which rake in the most money in terms of in-game spendings. Heck even my younger brother and especially my cousin have spend tens of thousands on skins and what not years ago. If the publishers of these titles don't bother about giving dedicated servers for India then I highly doubt that others will.
Lol just came across this
Edit: seems like claim of "life savings" was exaggerated. https://www.reddit.com/r/IndianGaming/s/QDtK2NKOSu
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