I did not see this thread originally after I posted my reply. So sorry, jupiter999! @_@
To answer your question (
12 days late! >_<), I would say ...
the short answer: not really, but yes a little ...
maybe.
the long answer: the most important things have always been and will always be:
a) your ISP's bandwidth provisions
b) the "health" of the torrent (how many seeds, how fast do they have their UL settings set, etc)
However, there are a few things which could impact the quality of your torrenting which are client-specific.
there are speed differences that you will see, yes, but it's not for the reasons you'd necessarily expect. So I'll explain in case you don't know ...
#1, some of the programs (e.g. the deprecated BitTorrent++) were not very well-written and sometimes announced erroneous data. For instance, one time BT++ told me that I was torrenting a file at 800+ kbps. That is not only possible but
likely for some torrents in today's world, but at the time (late 2003) it was almost unheard of. I remember that back then we all used to be ecstatic --
ecstatic! -- if we broke 120 kbps. I remember I used to think to myself, "If the torrent is seeded well, I can get 4.5 gigs in 24 hours." Today, I would
expect it, and I would
hope for 1.0 Mbps so that I could get it in about 5 hours. Another time, BT++ told me that I had "negative 1 hour, 32 minutes" left to download something which was only 87% complete. BT++ was confused because the torrent's health was so strong that the data was being sent to me fast.
Too fast -- too fast for BT++, that is. Because the speed was so fast, BT++ predicted a negative completion time. >_> lol (It makes me think of Spaceballs:
"they've gone to plaid!")
#2, in today's world (2007, 2008, and soon 2009), a lot of people will deliberately block incoming connections from users of certain clients which allow negative practices. For example, BitComet is notorious for this, whether the notoriety is deserved or not:
Wikipedia said:
During version 0.60, BitComet received bad publicity because its implementation of the DHT feature, which was new at the time, could be exploited to not respect the private flag of a tracker. This allowed users to avoid download and upload ratio restrictions, which are common on private trackers. Some private trackers responded to this by blacklisting version 0.60.
Wikipedia said:
In early 2007, John Hoffman, the creator of super-seeding and author of the BitTornado client, harshly criticized BitComet for using abusive tactics to "game" and "cheat" super-seeding at the expense of other peers: "Since BitComet has proven itself to be a harmful codebase, and since they have forced me to take steps I’d rather not have, I will also be banning connections from that client to my own client and tracker codebases."
The point is, whether or not these accusations were grounded in truth, people who used BitComet frequently found themselves downloading torrents with "0 seeds." They would then post on a webforum (like HongFire) and say, "Hey gaiz, no seeds
, halp plz kthxbye bbqpotatochips." And then the torrent's creator would say, "You need to use a client besides _____ and BitComet." (At the time, there was such a huge rivalry between Azureus and BitTornado, so whichever you didn't support was the one that went in the other blank. lol, handy little µTorrent wasn't even on most people's radars back then!)
The point is, this sort of behavior might still be taking place today without you knowing it. So as a general rule of thumb,
even if the rumors are wrong, I still wouldn't use a torrent client that has a bad reputation in the community. Because BT is peer-based, you mustn't ever underestimate the importance of the peers' beliefs. Even if those beliefs are superstitious or based on hearsay.