◊ Cadfael

That stuff works. Broadly speaking, the internet is the network between networks (that's what the word "internet" actually means).

Between you and the target system your PC is talking to, there are normally many different networks, all belong to other people and all have different capacity and load. Now imagine that between you and your WoW server, there is a part of the network that has a significant lower capacity. If your system (and everyone else's) would send data at full capacity what your local network can carry, but those little network in between had a way lower capacity, you'd overflood that network and traffic would break down there, causing trouble.

That's why the communication protocols, especially TCP which WoW uses, have traffic control mechanisms built in. They sort of notice when such things happen and slow down to sane levels to not cause total overflooding. Now these mechanisms are tuned to certain goals and TCP is generally tuned for bulk data transfer (which means full data packets at maximum speed normally). WoW does use TCP but it does use it in quite a complete different way. It sends lots of very small (non full) data packets at intervals. Now this works normally fine too, however one of the traffic control mechanisms now is kicking in here and is withholding packets for some milliseconds and sending them later. This causes extra latency.

There is a metric ton of parameters in networking that you can screw around with and this registry fix fiddles with one of them. It's a simple way to tell your operating system: Send a certain type of packet out as soon as you get it, do not wait under all circumstances. And this is what may help you. Since this is a global setting of your operating system, it may however influence other network applications as well, and not necessarily in a good way. It may reduce bulk download rates, for example. There is a reason why the default is what it is. If you want to min/max your WoW connection/latency, you should play around with it and see if it helps you or not and if you notice any adverse effect when not running WoW.

But it's neither a placebo nor psychology here. It's just a bit hard to explain (I simplified a lot) what it does. It's also a bit non-obvious which is why this has been discovered only after ~2 years.

 

Tamzin

cool thanx for info

 

Oscarvil

In my experience the TCP/ack regfix lowered the ping the Blizzard UI said but the variance on that ping varied by up to 200ms. (i.e. 300ms was at times actually 500ms) It still lowered the average ping a bit though.

Lowerping gives a very steady ping with low variance (+/-30ms) for me.

 

◊ pewsey

I cannot confirm with any scientific basis that it actually makes anything faster than the little number at the top.

I can confirm that after 3 years of playing, that it is indeed either the best placebo affect known to man, my reflexes have improved dramatically despite my aging years, or the registry changes do reduce latency to the level shown on my WoW client.

I'm paging Mr Occam to the thread.

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

Macaroni (Shaman), Linguini (Warlock), Penne (Mage) and Pewsey (Deathknight) on Northrend for WotLK Beta.

 

Oscarvil

Pewsey (amongst others) brings up a good point, it could just be a placebo effect.

I test using Quartz. By casting/cancelling my hearthstone over and over I can get a measure of the stability of the ping by reading the instantaneous measure of the ping that Quartz provides.

This is the way I got an idea of the amount my ping fluctuates with only the TCP/ack registry change (compared to without the change) and also how I verified the stability of the ping on Lowerping.

I think it is a good way of testing, I find the number in the default UI notoriously bad.

 

Rezdan

I hear Vista 32bit SP1 contains the TCPAckFrequency fix already. Did i misread?

 

◊ Cadfael

Well my Vista 64 home premium SP1 did not have the registry change built in. But you probably meant the patch that made the fix work because pre-SP1 on Vista the registry change does nothing at all. If you have a Vista SP1, you still need to change the registry for this to work. What you don't need to do anymore is patch your OS first, so that it actually has an effect.

As for the placebo question: Pewsey, you can come from the opposite side. You can with relative ease find out the IP address of your realm you are playing on. Then you can ping / traceroute this IP address without any registry change and you get a certain round trip time readout. You will hit some firewall blocking the pings but that's at the border of the blizzard-server space so it's basically one step before the realm.

Now you can go in-game, without the registry change, play for five minutes and read the latency reported here. It should be quite a bit higher.

Then exit the game, perform the change, reboot your system and re-enter the game. Again play for five minutes and look at the latency displayed in-game. It should much more match the out of game ping number now. And the game certainly does not show you artificially changed numbers because it monitors whether you set that registry key or not (besides there being other ways to achieve the same effect without using the registry key). Not exactly scientific proof but it's reversible and repeatable at will.

Note though that the in-game latency display is a smoothed average value, if you want something more accurate, use recounts realtime graph. You will have jitter (variation) of your latency and I'd expect the jitter being more pronounced when you use the registry fix than when you don't.

 

Iluminati

Alright, I just arrived in Australia yesterday and I had heard about this fix/workaround for Aussie players to get better latency on WoW.

I'm playing on a Windows vista 64 bit w/ SP1, pretty fast laptop and I searched this thread as well as I could and I think this is what I need. Could anyone confirm that this is what I need? My technical knowledge is really limited and I'd rather not screw up my laptop by mucking up my registry.

I've read the last couple pages with conflicting posts that Vista SP1 changed what I need...? Or that if I do this my normal internet speed will be negatively affected? Sorry for the pretty useless post overall, I just have no idea what I'm doing or talking about : \

 

Ragnor

There are two problems playing from Australian/New Zealand/Singapore/etc on US servers..

1: Windows default setting for acknowledgements
2: The nagle algorithm is still turned on at the wow server end (was patched to off in the client end back in 2.x) and causes your ping to be doubled (due to delayed acknowledgements).

The patch for Vista and subsequent registry change only fixes #1.

The easiest way to get the best ping possible (ie: fix #1 & 2) without having to change your registry at all is to tunnel your wow traffic over a SSH tunnel to a web host in the US.

Fortunately this site WoW Tunnels - Reduce Lag, The Free and Easy Way. offers a free ssh tunnel service (funded by donations) with easy to follow instructions/setup.

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

www.retpaladin.com

 

Lamaros

Having a look at that site indicates that it does indeed change your registry (or add a registry key, at least. I'm a bit slow with these technical things). Do you use their service and and can you vouch for it?

 

SchmoZz

The registry changes are the settings for putty (the SSH client that creates the tunnel) and Freecap (the program that pipes WoW through the tunnel). Having said that, I haven't used the service and can't vouch for it. I am basing this off a quick look at the .reg file.

 

Ragnor

Ah right I forgot I already had putty and freecap setup as we've been running our own guild ssh server for over a year.

You can configure the two applications manually, or you use the registry file generated by the site. If you're worried you can open the .reg file in a plain text editor (like notepad) and look at the contents. It's all just settings for putty and freecap.

As I said we've run our own guild SSH server installed on some cheap linux web hosting for around a year and a half. Recently the host started having network problems at about the same time as wowtunnels decided to go free based on donations.

A lot of us switched over and have been using it for ~6 months. I would say 60% of our raid is using wowtunnels and the rest are either using our guild ssh server or something else.

The first popular pay ssh tunnel service for wow that came out was LOWERPING.COM - lower ping for gamers basically halving your ping is such a night an day difference there are many sites offering this type of service now. It's not very complicated there's just a matter of finding a good/cheap US host and doing it.

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

www.retpaladin.com

 

Iluminati

Thanks very much for the help. It was easy and brought my ping down from around 600 to between 200-400. One thing though is that the in-game voice chat no longer works. I only noticed because one of my friends can listen on vent but not talk (something wrong with his mic we haven't figured out yet) but it works just fine on the in game so when we pvp together we use that.

Nothing big, just an FYI for anyone using the fix.

 

lilevil

Although this may be a little bit off the topic, but I play in one of the Korean servers while I reside in the U.S, so I was hoping that someone else might have a similar problem I have..
My ping is usually between 300 to 400 decreased from 500-600 before.
The latency is not my biggest concern though. I do not mind the half-a-second delay in whatever I'm doing, but I keep getting this big chunks of lag where everyone else including all the npcs will get stuck in whatever the motion they were doing, for example, moonwalking in the same place or casting a spell for 20 seconds. When the lag goes away, everything that happened would happen really fast like fastforwarding a video tape in about 2 seconds.
I thought that it must be my unstable comcast cable connection, but I recently found out that I can stil cast, move, and chat, but I just would not see the results right away. On top of that, my group members will not see me lagging, and will see me cast, move, and chat as usual. It's just me who's getting the information back from the server late.
I do get a lot of ping losses with my unstable comcast cable "high-speed" internet in an old apartment, and I am pretty sure that the ping losses must be the problem, but the fact that I can still send signals to the server makes me think that it might be the wow client program which handles ping losses too sensitively than it should.
Does anyone here have a same problem as I do?

 

• Falk

Upstream and downstream bandwidth cap differently, and there's a whole boatload of weird net infrastructure out there... I doubt the problem here resides in the client itself, other than making the communication protocols more efficient.

 

Joink

I had the same problem.

I recently switched from a wired connection to wireless and the registry fix wasn't helping and had to be undone. It was causing my random packet loss (that comes from my wireless connection not being as close to the router as id like) to cause 1-2 second delays where WoW would stop sending info causing everything to pause for the 1-2 seconds like you said then fastforward with everything thats happened.

My ingame ping from the UI is higher again but I don't notice much difference minus the packet loss to cause terrible hiccups in gameplay. My casting delays reported by Quartz haven't changed much but seem to be less varied.

Anyway i'd recommend changing TcpAckFrequency back to 0 and see how that works for you.

 

Replica

I tried the registry fix many months ago (probably when this thread was created) and i suspect any improvement i felt was merely placebo. I have also been using Wowtunnels for the past few weeks and during peak times my latency sits at 250-320, usually green. For perspective, normally i would have been 450-700, with the bar being red as often as it would be yellow.

However i refuse to vouch for the awesomeness of Wowtunnels because doing so might decrease the quality of service i receive from it due to the increase in people using it.

The guy running it has been adding more tunnels at a fairly steady pace though (matching demand where required). I just hope donations can keep up with the increased traffic which is inevitable as more people hear about it. The mere existence of the service is contingent upon donations. On a side note, my new ISP at one point offered its own similar tunneling service, but for whatever reason they bailed on it.

If there IS a risk (like account security and being hacked or whatever) i can't be sure, and quite frankly i don't care because i can now pummel cyclones far more consistently that i ever have been able to do so. Not having to cry about latency is truly a great feeling. Blizzard tech did advise me i should stop using it, deeming it 'not necessary'. I beg to differ on that account. Something tells me none of their GMs or Tech guys are oceanic. Just a hunch.

 

• Falk

Honestly, I'm repeating myself here but all the evidence anyone really needs is to compare how the Oceanic raiding scene fared pre-2.1 and post-2.1, which is more or less the time these discussions took place. Reduction in latency and the new spellcasting mechanics accounted for a large fraction of the reason we see the fastest oceanic Illidan ranking about world 150th, to the fastest oceanic Kil'jaeden kill being ~35th, with multiple guilds ranking in the top 100. We didn't magically collectively become better players.

Well, maybe we did, but that's still a huge leap in standings. :P