want to start an open forum to discuss online game delivery and how latency, packet loss can ruin a players online experience - more importantly how to avoid this and improve your gamers experience.

Greetings lewstherin71!

Interesting topic of discussion. Currently I am taking a Network class and I am not convinced that it is a coincidence that you bring this subject up...

With the rise of online gaming, it is important that your player-base remain engaged with minimal technical disruption. One topic for discussion is cloud-computing and how this could change the way games and more specifically, online games are played. To keep it simple, you as the player will be streaming the game while processing will be handled at a central location.

I myself am curious to see where this avenue will take online gameplay but beware, this is a topic that is passionately debated about amongst us programmers.

;-)

Very interesting company that seems to helping tackel some of the latency and packet loss issues is Internap. They buy bandwidth from 8 differtn back bones and then intelligently route the IP based on least path of resistance. Cool stuff. Better gaming experieince.