NETDUMA Initial Impressions - Destiny Player (XBOX ONE)

[Greg34]

I just got my NetDuma router, I mainly purchased it for playing Destiny, I've read a lot in the forums about some of the issues people have been having with the way Destiny does P2P matchmaking, while I'm not highly technical I do have a bachelor's degree in Computer Information Systems and used to provide technical support for a company that manufactured residential gateways (routers).

 

Prior to purchasing the Netduma I was using another "gaming router" which was fairly difficult to configure in terms of settings like most home routers, I say that with a grain of salt because it's mostly a lot of experimentation with playing with static IPs, disabling/enabling DMZ, setting Upstream/Downstream QoS and the like. None of it however really improved or from what I could tell impacted my Destiny experience in terms of PvP. We've all been there, and we all mostly know, Destiny is a lagfest...for the most part. I've always said about 50% of my engagements seemed to be dictated by my latency/ping, having a 125/mbps down and 25/mbps up connection it seemed to me I should have been getting better games but it doesn't matter how beefy your connection is if you get high latency games. Additionally I live in AZ and I always suspected it seemed like I mostly was always playing against folks on the East Coast or other countries, that's what it felt like.

 

After setting up the Netduma last night I was able to get some regular Crucible games in for initial testing and ultimately was able to get on with some of my friends for Trials.

 

Initial Impressions with 1.03.3 (I only just now figured out how to upgrade the firmware):

 

1. It seemed MOST of my games were very crisp and pretty much lag free, there were some higher latency connections (In the 80-100ms range) as I was testing pings during the gameplay but it was mostly pretty responsive and most of shots "were counting", or "registering". Needless to say I saw an immediate improvement in my scores/performance. (Although I already knew I was a decent player but could never be sure with the lag).

 

2. It's empowering once setting up the Geo Filter that you can see in game where people are connecting from and being able to anticipate potential latency based on their locations. In regards to Geo filtering I had watched a few videos and noticed on 1.03.3 that none of the "locks" were showing up in the filtering. I found what I thought was the "Destiny PvE" server for going into the tower but I cannot seem to add it to the whitelist, although it still worked. IE, I could go into the tower and things of that nature, further I feel like I'll just turn Geofilter off for PvE anyway so not a big deal. I'm guessing with the cloud updates the programmers/devs from NetDuma have been working on that it is probably already added.

 

With that said, and one of the reasons I mention I suspected most of my games I'm connecting with East Coast players is because now with the GeoFilter I was able to confirm that to be the case. Out of my 15 or so games I played only once was there another player in Arizona, all other hosts/players were midwest to East Coast.

 

I found this to be somewhat odd... 

 

3. It seemed easy to configure, the UI help pop-ups give a slightly better understanding of what each setting does. 

 

Other gameplay observations:

 

1. During play in Trials of Osiris I noticed at times I would still get connected to people outside my Geo Filter, however not far outside my geo filter (I have mine set to cover most of North America (about 1400 miles from where I live)). However the connections still seemed to be fairly strong, in about 15 some odd matches there was only one game that seemed "suspect".

 

2. It seems difficult to blacklist people, The slider isn't entirely intuitive maybe there should just be a button that says; "blacklist"? At any rate I figured it out. The reason why I brought this up there was one person who was red barring inside my geo filter range but his bar went yellow/red/green throughout the match sporadically and ping test revealed an average ms to him around 100-120.

 

Suggestions:

 

1. I struggled at first with figuring out how to ensure NAT was open, turning off Geo Filter and resetting my XBOX seemed to be a weird way to go about it, why not just give some setting or button to open NAT for that device?

 

2. WiFi - I've always had my WiFi set to disable SSID Broadcast, I do not see that setting anywhere, please add it.

 

3. Is there some way we can better determine through the Geo Filter who is who in game? In my example above I would have liked to blacklist the one guy whose connection was bouncing around but I cannot see a way to determine exactly which one he/she is.

 

All in all good first experience, things seem to be working well from I can tell from my initial impressions.

[Netduma Fraser]

Hey thank you very much for the feedback! Glad to hear you seem to be liking it. I'll answer a couple of the queries you had: 

• The padlocks are dedicated servers which we don't allow you to allow/deny (although an upcoming update will allow you to temp ban dedicated servers). If you believe it was a PvE server could you provide me with the ID please as this may need to be whitelisted.
• It won't always place you with players directly located where you are. It's likely they're getting connected to further away players most of the time.
• If you've got strict mode off this is what we recommend and is why you'll see things outside the Geo-filter. As you found out this shouldn't effect the connection too badly.
• We do want to redesign the entire allow/deny feature in future.
• Normally for NAT that is a last resort if putting the R1 in the DMZ hasn't worked. 
• Good suggestion for broadcast, I'll add it to the ticket system
• We're planning on doing that feature in future

[Greg34]

Thanks, for what its worth one other suggestion, which I don't if it's worth it or trying but, maybe to bolster the GeoFilter to some extent but have you guys thought about adding country specific filtering?

 

IE, an option to turn off the radius filtering and then choose just USA, or USA and Canada? Or use a combination of both the radius and country filtering...? I'm thinking the radius feature by distance is probably easier to program.

[Netduma Fraser]

Thanks, for what its worth one other suggestion, which I don't if it's worth it or trying but, maybe to bolster the GeoFilter to some extent but have you guys thought about adding country specific filtering?

 

IE, an option to turn off the radius filtering and then choose just USA, or USA and Canada? Or use a combination of both the radius and country filtering...? I'm thinking the radius feature by distance is probably easier to program.

 

It may be possible but with an east coast player connecting to a west coast player would not have a great connection. So that would probably happen with country specific filtering. It has been talked about that we may give the ability to "draw" your radius to customise it more.

[R3M!X]

@Greg You mentioned you play trials. I'm curious however, do you play with strict mode on in that game mode? Ever? I've always wanted to test this, but based on experience on just normal pvp I would get booted. Considering trials is a very competitive mode and trying to conduct the test myself. I don't think I can. The team I play with take that mode serious and that going in to try and experiment will pretty much be frowned upon them as it would be a waste of time. I really wanna try strict mode on with trials and see if It would be a much better gaming experience.