u/ekostros

Hi everyone,

I recently switched to a 1000/1000 Mbps symmetrical fiber connection. With my previous ISP, I could easily max out my torrent speeds. Now, however, my download speed often gets stuck around 15–20 MB/s instead of climbing higher.

qBittorrent v5.1.0 (64-bit)

windows 11

No vpn

I'm trying to figure out what's causing this. Am I simply connecting to too few seeds, or could my ISP be limiting or otherwise affecting torrent traffic? Could it be a routing or peering issue? Is there anything I can do on my end to troubleshoot or fix it?

My upload performance is even worse. I have plenty of active public torrents in my seeding list, but almost nobody connects to me. Occasionally, a few peers connect, but they only download from me at around 100–300 KiB/s. With so many active torrents and a 1 Gbps upload connection, I expected to have many more peers connected and to be uploading at much higher speeds.

Has anyone experienced something similar after switching ISPs? Any suggestions on what I should check or test?

For example, there's a very popular torrent that was uploaded just today and it currently has around 2,500 peers. Despite that, my upload speed stays between 400 KiB/s and 1 MB/s.

With that many people downloading the torrent, shouldn't I be uploading at much higher speeds? My connection is capable of uploading at around 90 MB/s, but it never goes beyond 400 KiB/s to 1 MB/s.

Hi everyone, I’m a 38 year old die hard Call of Duty fan. I practically spent my youth on this franchise from 2003 to 2013. For me, the peak era of CoD was definitely MW2 and Black Ops 2. Although I loved MW2 a bit more, Black Ops 2 introduced something unique in CoD history: the "Search Preferences (Any-Normal-Best)" option. Thanks to this feature, I experienced the most level playing field of my life, completely free of connection disadvantages.
Not having SBMM was also the best part. You could be the king of one lobby, and get absolutely crushed in the next. It felt like the natural ups and downs of everyday life. Overall, I was an above-average player, maintaining a K/D ratio between 2.0 and 3.0 across almost all games.
Until Ghosts came along...
After the dream-like experience of Black Ops 2, the franchise started mutating into something entirely different. First of all, P2P matchmaking was gone, replaced by a dedicated server system. The domestic lobby search feature from BO2 was scrapped; instead, they threw the entire Middle East and the Balkans into the same central European server pool.
On top of that, they added SBMM and completely overhauled the map design. Instead of checking 2 or 3 sightlines while moving across the map, they increased the possibilities to 8 or 10, destroying map control and turning the game into pure chaos. I remember listening to an interview with a former Ghosts dev who left the studio that year. He explained that Activision explicitly demanded this layout so that someone playing an FPS for the very first time could still feel successful. He mentioned they speeded up the gameplay, opened up countless windows, routes, and mantle spots to create chaos, and implemented SBMM. The goal was to force everyone toward a 1.0 stat line—ensuring no one could completely dominate a lobby, but also ensuring no one felt like a total failure.

I live in Turkey. The internet quality here has never been great, and it’s still way below world standards. I don't know the exact technical bottleneck, but after the shift from P2P to dedicated servers, playing CoD in Turkey became virtually impossible. We started experiencing at least a 1-second delay. During the P2P era before Ghosts, we never had such issues. Suddenly, I was dying before the enemy even appeared on my screen. After years of running a 3.0 K/D, my stats tanked to 0.7 - 0.9 in Ghosts and subsequent titles. Combining this massive connection disadvantage with a gameplay loop that was 10x faster and chaotic made the game unplayable. 13 years have passed, and the situation remains the same. In fact, I had completely quit playing for the last 6 or 7 years.
But after all these years of longing, the Black Ops 2 PS5 port finally dropped. The very first thing I checked was whether it used P2P or dedicated servers, and if that legendary "Search Preferences" feature was still there. When I saw they were intact, I bought it instantly.
I can’t put into words the joy I’m getting from the game right now; I feel like I've traveled back to the golden years. I’m playing on a perfectly level playing field with zero connection disadvantage. When I set the Search Preferences to "Best," it creates a lobby using only local players or, at most, players from neighboring countries. It never matches me with distant servers. Because of this, everyone plays under equal conditions. Despite 13 years of rust, I'm currently sitting at a 2.1 K/D.
I will probably keep playing the Black Ops 2 PS5 port for the rest of my life, until the player base completely dies out.