Ngita

Your conclusion is wrong. Yes Telstra has a times routed us through Asian Cables to get a better price but their are no hops either on the way or at Blizzards end that limit speed. Avele gives a reasonable sounding explanation above for the issues behind this but as Mac user on BigPond Cable my ping has mostly averaged out at 250-300 for the last 3 years .

 

◊ pewsey

Bigpond Cable - Windows User - Location Melbourne, Australia

Most nights 220-250 ms
Random nights 300-350 ms

This has got significantly better since I applied the registry fix. The 2.3.2 patch made no difference. I was at 500ms previously.

Pewsey has heard about tact and discretion, but tends to regard them much as children view vegetables.

 

Scradam

Possibly It's just the difference distance between eastern states and west Australia that makes my ping so much higher then you guys.

 

Pheus

I'm in WA on bigpond adsl, i averaged around 550 without the registry fix and now around 350 with it, without the fix my ping is still around 550 in the current patch

 

TSplodey

Is anyone suffering random latency spikes from Australia (QLD to be specific)? I have been getting 600-1000ms spikes for almost a week now, but this is also during the day. I havent changed anything recently, so is it Blizzard, Telstra, mine or something elses fault, cause its really getting to me now.

 

Oscarvil

We had them on Wednesday night during our raids, many people complained about them and a few (including myself) DC'd. It didn't happen to everyone however, enough to not wipe on trash before Kaz'rogal. The same sort of thing happened a lot after the 2.4 patch with the 'new honour lag' which seems to have gone away over the past 2 weeks, apart from Weds obviously.

Oh and 15mins after this happened we got a server shutdown which lasted about 20mins. They probably broke something on the server during the extended maintainence the previous day.

 

◊ Greenexile

Could some of the clever interweb technical people comment on the likelihood of setting up an Australian data centre for the Oceanic region? I hate to spread gossip, but I keep hearing semi believable rumours that EA are about to announce Australian based servers for WAR when it is released in September?

Putting aside whether that gossip is true or not, I was always under the impression that Australia's monolithic networking infrastructure would make any Australian servers of any MMO pretty much impossible? Does Australia have the capacity to host servers that would be able to handle the load of a decent MMO and still be affordable for a company intending to make a profit?

 

Cyn

Server locations, Latency & Australia

 

◊ Greenexile

Yeah sorry, I didn't really word things right. I have read the thread, albeit I read the first pages whenever the thread first came up a few months ago. I guess I'm wondering if someone in the know is aware of some changes that might now mean Australian based servers are a possibility?

I've always been under the assumption that Australian servers are just never going to happen - the pure $ invested v potential return issue. However, if its true that WAR will be able to pull it off, perhaps something in the industry has changed? If WoW's primary competitors (WAR) are able to host servers here, then the '$ invested v potential return' will change quite a bit.

I guess my question is, how bad is Australia's network infrastructure currently? Is it so bad that its just not possible to host that kind of data centre? Or bad enough so that we could host one, but iit would still be far below the world standard? Or.. is it the case that if one of the big companies were to do it, the others would follow suit as now there is a much bigger return on their investment (ie. staying competitive in the market) ?

 

Oscarvil

Australian WoW servers aren't going to happen. There is no incentive for Blizzard to install them. They have plenty of customers paying them for the service they provide (WoW +200ms ping) and are happy about it, by definition, otherwise they wouldn't be customers.

WAR on the other hand is a new MMO trying to get into the market, so it makes sense that they use some of their resources set up a data centre in the southern hemisphere to attract a larger share of the potential customers by the virtue of having better latency.

And as everyone knows, nothing, not even WAR is going to 'kill' WoW so even if WoW loses some customers to WAR it still won't be incentive enough for Blizzard to open a data centre in Australia. Especially not for a game this far into it's life cycle.

 

◊ pewsey

It's got nothing to do with our infrastructure - which is fine. It's to do with the charging model.

Server locations, Latency & Australia

Server locations, Latency & Australia

Pewsey has heard about tact and discretion, but tends to regard them much as children view vegetables.

 

nfw

I don't live in Australia, but I do have a latency related problem so I thought I'd try my luck here.

I get a pretty consistent 50ms ping according to Blizzard's latency bar in outdoor zones, and the number from Quartz cast bar is around 100 or less, which is what I expect since I think Quartz measures round trip.
But in instances, I still get the same ping according to Blizzard's UI, but Quartz shots up to 200-300ms, and there's a noticable difference in responsiveness.

Are the instance servers not in the same location as the world server? Or the instance servers tend to be slower or heavier loaded?

 

• Falk

O_o?

To be more useful, server activity can and will affect responsiveness of casts/abilities/etc which is ultimately what Quartz measures.

 

◊ Greenexile

Warhammer Online To Get Local Aussie Server

Admittedly, WAR is still the underdog in the market, but at what point does Blizzard start to reconsider the issue of locally based servers?

I can see your point but I'm not sure if I agree with it. In my opinion the fact that a large number of Oceanic subscribers continue to play WoW doesn't mean Blizzard couldn't have a larger market share if they opened up servers here. Especially if their competitors (albeit however young and unproven they may be) are doing it. If there isnt a specific infrastructure problem preventing them - and that seems to be the case - then at some point Blizzard simply has to meet the standard its customers have come to expect.

It goes beyond a simple 'WAR is doing it so why isn't Blizzard' issue - at the moment as well as making a great game, WoW is dominant because there just aren't any real competitors in the market. I'm excited about WotLK to be sure, but if WAR turns out to be a half way decent game then that, plus the general change of scenery and a massive difference in ping would probably be enough to sway me. Blizzard are too savvy to not be thinking about changing their position?

 

zanmat0

I have been reading about various ways to lower WoW latency in this thread and in other forums, but I just wanted to know, considering I am running Vista Ultimate with SP1 installed, would applying a registry fix still have a beneficial effect and if so, which fix?

I play from Asia and routinely experience latencies in the 500ms so any help is appreciated_

 

Shakes

I don't know, it's not just the latency, but the downtime and lag during peak play time. You only have to be on your guild's vent or in general chat for a raid zone to hear the level of frustration Oceanic players have with the current situation.

Will WAR kill WoW? No, of course not. But at least for Oceanic players, I think Blizzard has worn down their reputation a bit, and people will be more likely to try out WAR than they otherwise would be. I also think it'll give WAR the edge it needs to get a foothold. I fully expect WAR to not be as polished as WoW currently is on release, but I think lots of people will say "Well, it's not as good as WoW yet, but at least it doesn't have high latency and lag/downtime in my peak time, I'll give it time".

Will this be enough to convince Blizzard to install real Oceanic servers? Who knows, but I do think it's created a real opening for WAR in this market. I know I will certainly try it, where as before I was on the fence and probably wouldn't have unless it got amazing reviews. I'm not alone in this, others I've talked to have said the same thing. It's of course up to the WAR devs to produce a good enough game to hold onto us Oceanics craving a local server.

 

Andrast

In my experience yes. I was the author of such a thread on my realm forums (WoW Forums -> Howto: Reduce your Latency).

I run Vista Home Premium and the fix still makes around 100-150ms difference to my ping as measured by recount's realtime graph. I done hours of testing on this subject and it makes a big difference.

 

xarg

I agree with pretty much all of this, while I was 50/50 on trying out WAR, I'll definitely be giving it a go since there's an aussie server. Showing this kind of support might even encourage blizzard to consider it.

 

Lanth

Lack of Australian servers was effectively the reason why I quit. Took a while to figure out, but I realised it in the end.

Got to 70, so I could either go PvP or PvE. It's hard to PvP effectively with a 400-500 ping (think half a second before anything happens. Thats what it means), and I couldn't PvE effectively because the Americans were raiding while I was asleep.

 

Pheus

A 20$ transfer to an Australian populated server (blackrock at least has many Australian time zone guilds raiding in all levels of content) would have solved your raiding problem and warlocks without facing or positioning requirements are probably the easiest class to pvp with in high ping. Yeah, you can't play as effectively as Americans with 50 ping, but there are a heap of Australian players with 2k+ ratings on BG9, Bloodlust.

 

Ragnor

Pretty much.

High population unofficial oceanic servers like Blackrock and a decent ssh connection (lowerping, wowtunnels, pingbetter, gamepath, your own custom hosting, etc) is all you need to make the game about 100% more enjoyable at the end game.

The universe is run by the complex interweaving of three elements. Energy, matter, and enlightened self-interest.

 

Tamzin

I can't seem to find the question I want answered anywhere so I'm asking it here, sorry if this is a re-post but I couldn't find the answer so :-/

Question: Does anyone know for a fact do these changes ACTUALLY make you have less latency in game or are they only making the latency number lower. ie not really doing anything in terms of making the game faster, but they do make the reported ping lower ofc. Anyone know?

 

moowalk

Lowerping.com. Disclaimer: may not actually lower your ping?

After playing on my girlfriend's un-lowerpinged account. I can assure you that there is a real difference

 

Ragnor

The difference is absolutely massive.

The universe is run by the complex interweaving of three elements. Energy, matter, and enlightened self-interest.