The more people we connect to, the slower things go. Connecting to one or two people is pain free, even five isn't horrible. Six seems to be the straw on the cammels back, and it clogs up our end of things with these ACK Packages.
this confuses me because what i think you are refering to is SYN-ACK, which is TCP only!
Connection establishment
To establish a connection, TCP uses a three-way handshake. Before a client attempts to connect with a server, the server must first bind to a port to open it up for connections: this is called a passive open. Once the passive open is established, a client may initiate an active open. To establish a connection, the three-way (or 3-step) handshake occurs:
- The active open is performed by the client sending a SYN to the server.
- In response, the server replies with a SYN-ACK.
- Finally the client sends an ACK back to the server.
At this point, both the client and server have received an acknowledgment of the connection.
Here is some information on UDP, which is what the game uses:
UDP uses a simple transmission model without implicit hand-shaking dialogues for guaranteeing reliability, ordering, or data integrity. Thus, UDP provides an unreliable service and datagrams may arrive out of order, appear duplicated, or go missing without notice. UDP assumes that error checking and correction is either not necessary or performed in the application, avoiding the overhead of such processing at the network interface level.
UDP applications use "datagram sockets" to establish host-to-host communications. Sockets bind the application to ports, that function as the endpoints of data transmission.
i also found this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_transmission_unit,
(MTU) A higher MTU value brings greater efficiency because each packet carries more user data while protocol overheads, such as headers or underlying per-packet delays remain fixed, and higher efficiency means a slight improvement in bulk protocol throughput.
hopefully that helps.