Apparently, I’m a gamer
I’ve been playing Magic online for quite some time now, and have always had problems connecting to other players. Magic isn’t a bandwidth intensive or particularly sensitive to network latency, but I found that more and more I’m getting disconnected, have huge (10 seconds +) lag, and just plain connection problems.
Well, today, the problem is solved. It appears that Smile 012, my ISP, had to classify me as a “Gamer Profile” in order to get a straight connection working. These two test sites just would not work 99% of the time under the normal profile. It appears that the so called Gamer Profiles are connected to the internet backbone by fewer hops (012 usually charge 15 NIS – 4$ for this privilege). I’m not sure why it worked – as I mentioned, Magic shouldn’t be affected this much by latency.
Anyway, if you have the dubious pleasure of being a 012 customer, and want a supposedly better connection to the backbone, just tell them the tests sites I listed don’t work well for you – they won’t charge you for it. I think it also improved my torrent speeds.
