Had a bizarre moment last night whilst trying to race online.

I setup up a private server on my home pc last night so that a mate of mine could join and we would have a blast around.

When I first connected to the master server my little green bar in the bottom left was pulsing as you would expect. I definately had a connection to the server as i could read my PB.
However, when my mate joined, his bars on my PC suddenly started redlining and had bad lag...very odd.
So we changed around, he started an online game, and his green bar pulsed perfectly, however when i joined the lag was horrendous. This has never happened to us before and was wondering if there was a BLIP in the master server connection or whether it was just one of those nights when internet traffic was high.

Any explanations?

Andrew

What connections do you both have? are you both with the same ISP?

yup both with f2s.com

aaaargghhh see what you might be getting at!!

EDIT

although having said that we are 30 miles apart so we are on different exchanges.
btw both on 8mb (well 4-6)

so you are both on the same ISP, was this at peak times? i.e. between 6pm - 11pm?, reckon that your problem might be bandwidth shaping.

we were on at about 7.30 ish but we meet up every wednesday evening and this never happened before........

I would say it's an ISP problem, they have possibly started shaping the bandwidth at peak times, either that or they were particularly busy at that point

going to try again soon, what i should have done last night was join another server to see if the lag was apparent there.

The connection to the server and the little pulsing bars have nothing to do with the master server. The master server is just used to serve the info on the servers and to authenticate licenced users. You establish a drect link bewteen yourself and the game server which is what the green bars represent. Try using a different port number such as 27000 as it might not be shaped.