jayowen

The only way I can see a service like this helping is if there is something fishy going on with your ISPs traffic prioritisation/ upstream routing or the networking code in WOW is bad. Both of these things are possible. It could also be simple placebo effect with no gameplay differences other than the lower ping number shown in game due to the background shenanigans.

 

nife

Qos is rediculously expensive(cpu usage) on core and border routers. No self respecting ISP does any more QoS then they need to.


On a separate issue anyone know what data centers blizz uses ? They seem pretty good. I've never seen them down for cut fiber or power outage. They have had some times where there were routing issues, but thats different.

 

ter

If lowerping.com does what it says it does I'd be more than interested. In game pings will not convince me however. If any casters who use quartz could tell me if their cast bar latency has been reduced, then I'd be convinced. In the mean time, I think I'll sign up for the trial. Nothing to loose really...

 

Acaila

Looked at a map lately? You do know NZ is significantly closer to LAX then Adelaide right? That might have just a tiny influence on your ping compared to mine...

My point about QoS was in regards to my connection, I know that the link I use to connect to my WoW server is not congested and has no QoS on it. No SSH tunnel or L2TP session to the US is going to improve it, if anything it will worsen a connection due to the extra overhead.

Way OT now, I've explained why I think this is a farce, but its a free internet do as you will and all that.

 

• Althor

I'm sorry but if you applied some common sense you'd quite quickly see that it's NOT a case of just "server lag" causing high latency.

I play from Australia. My latency to Spinebreaker (which is a Dallas, Texas server) usually comes in around 450 to 550ms.
My latency to my vent server (also in Dallas) averages 210ms.

The latency of some of my guild mates who live in...wait for it...Dallas, Texas to the game is around 20ms. At the exact same time that I'm at 450 to 550ms.

If it was purely server lag then their latency would be around 250 to 300ms.

There is *something* going on here.

Maybe it's not Internode (I sure hope not because I'm a Node customer). Maybe it's not the international link itself. But somewhere along the line I'm gaining (and pretty much all other Australian players) around 250 to 300ms of extra latency with no good reason.

*edit* That said I recently tried one of those tunneling services (not lowerping) and saw no improvement at all.

 

Gogusrl

Isn`t anyone afraid of suspensions / bans from Blizzard for account sharing from their point of view ? Will they accept your word and a link as proof that you aren`t sharing, you just started using a proxy server ?

 

• Calantus

I'm on Internode and get 200-300 latency so I doubt it's that.

 

◊ Shalas

You don't trust the in game ping, but you do trust something calculated from the in game ping?

I rather do expect Blizzard to believe that you just started using a proxy server when you switch from an Australian ip to a proxy marketed to Australians.

 

drizzy

I recently moved from Australia to the UK and have rerolled on EU servers. I ping about 15ms from London to the servers in Paris and my in game ping is usually 50-120ms, from unscientific observation and general 'vibe' I reckon it'd average 80ms. I find it unlikely that I'm gaining up to 100ms in latency as a function of the network connection - it's far more likely to be related to the server in some way.

 

Calen

Despite a fair bit of anecdotal evidence in this thread, and the problems with trusting the in-game latency figures, there are some good examples of people with a in game latency considerably larger than the expected numbers based of network transit alone.

Let's assume that a world server packet processing has a median server processing time of 10ms. Someone in Dallas, playing on a nearby server with a 40ms 'network latency' would see a 50ms ping; a 25% increase above bare network latency. Someone in Hong Kong, with a 400ms network latency would only see a 2.5% increase from server processing.

If at peak play times the server processing takes 40ms, the Dallas client would see a 100% increase, and the guy in HK just another 10%. If anyone is going to complain at this point, it's probably the guy in Dallas.

Is it possible that during login, you are classified based on the expected physical location of your source IP or your network latency, and then subsequently given a processing priority?

If a given world server is processing requests its maximum rate, throttled by either network or by server software/hardware performance, I had previously imagined a simple round-robin approach, which would slowly add processing latency to all client requests.

From the point of view of a wow players' perception of service, dropping the priority on distant/higher network latency clients would be less noticeable and would better disguise poor server performance than sharing the latency equally on all.


I do think we could validate or invalidate this idea with some help from those playing overseas on US servers:

• Does your perceived originating IP actually alter your server processing time? (Does a proxy actually work?)
• Is network latency (not physical location) used in determining processing priority instead?

Some tests of the lowping service might reveal changes based on perceived location.

If someone is capable of adding a delay to their network latency to the bliz servers, and could generate some numbers to correlate server with network latency we might have a better idea about the possible mechanisms at work here.


This is all quite possibly heapable speculation, and as I am playing from Canada can't easily test these ideas.. but I am curious about the possible mechanisms at work here, especially as I have a number of friends playing out of HK/AU/NZ.


Note: I should double check that interfering with the transit of Bliz destined packets isn't a violation of the ToS - I seem to remember some PvPers adding latency to become harder to hit, and getting banned for it, ages ago..

 

Drunkmunky

I think that was from spamming a stand up/sit down macro with a do loop in it to generate huge lag while they got away with the flag in wsg, that was promptly fixed so you can't use loops in macros. Correct me if I'm wrong.

The only way to prove this Lowping.com thing is to get someone on it using Quartz castbar to see if the actual cast time of spells is reduced or if it is just the client measured latency. I would be quite inclined to beleive that if you're tunneling to the US and connecting from there that it would infact measure from there. The only way I can see to improve latency in the slightest is if you could force your packets to go the route you wanted, i.e. not through the slow and congested southern cross link.

 

Kambo

I'm with Internode and Fubar tells me I have 400-500 latency.

 

• Falk

As far as I know, Quartz castbar's red zone for each individual cast is calculated from the time your GCD activates (i.e. your button press) to the time the castbar appears on your screen. This is why when you spike for a moment, you can get like 3/4 of the castbar red, whereas your in-game ping reading shows no immediate change.

The Quartz castbar is LITERALLY the delay you get from button press to castbar appearance, and for that individual cast. It's not calculated from the in-game ping display. Pretty easy to notice when your ISP is being choked and your latency (the feel of it, not the in-game display) is fluctuating and spiking rapidly. :P

 

• Intermission

I read somewhere (probably here) that the main reason for the lower ping was because:

Somewhere in the line from where the pacific link ends (the US coast) to the actual server (eg Frostmorne), there is a router/server/whatever device that throws our packets to the bottom of the priority list because they originated from overseas, Australia for example.

Is this possible? If so, I guess the tunneling service would make that mystery box *not* slow us down due to our location, because it thinks it's originating from the US.

I know very little about the way internet traffic works... so I'm sketchy on the details and technical terms.

 

Darkmantle

I know plenty of people that have shared accounts between Ausrtalia and America. They have never been banned. The only way I've ever heard of people getting banned on my server for account sharing is when people report them for doing it while grinding to Rank 14. There is no automatic tracking which is going to get you banned.

 

• Calantus

I was just coming in here to post a correction to my numbers. I remember having 200-300 latency at one point but didn't check before posting, since then I've noticed 400-500 latency. My brother is currently on 320 and is with iinet (we have 2 seperate internet lines), the provider I was also with before Internode and probably where I got the 200-300 number.

Unfortunately the reason I switched originally is because Internode is also more stable in NSW so I doubt I'll be going back.

 

Avengement

I'm going to give this lowerping.com a go and see how it goes. I don't really cry about ping times as I got over them a very long time ago, but if this system works then it just might be worth it.

 

nife

Is this possible? Yes in the sense that anything is possible if the routers can be made to do just about anything.

In the real world these things are not happening in the USA. Our biggest backbone carriers are all trying to remain on people's good sides right now(Lot of politics and I could write more but this is a WoW forum not a tech one; so I'll only go into detail if asked,). So as a result these big ISP's are trying to play nice. And in doing so they are keeping the internet a level playing field. They don't look at source or destination when determining quality of service.

With longer distances comes higher latency unless you can have a packet of energy break the speed of light. And if you do that... Come to me first I will make sure you have a lower ping wow connection.

 

moowalk

See, I thought this too once, but light travels at 300,000 km a second and the distance between LA and Sydney is 12,093 km. Clearly it doesn't take 500 ms to travel that far, rather it's about 40 ms to go that far.

Edit - Oops, it's going through a medium so it's closer to 60ms

 

• Falk

Isn't the majority of latency coming from repeaters, routers and such and not actual propagation time? That's what I remember from net com back when I did engineering, at least.

Edit: As in, physical distance does increase your minimum latency, but due to the delays involved in the actual hardware for succesfully transmiting across the Pacific, but it has nothing to do with the speed of light.

 

Mex

I have very little understanding of physics, but I'll say right now that there's no way data will travel at the speed of light, I just can't explain exactly why!

60ms or 40ms or whatever would be the theoretical maximum, as in going faster than that would break the laws the physics. However, realistically 250-300ms is the practical maximum, as in going faster than that would break the laws of the practical reality in which we live, where other traffic, processing times, resistance from the cables, etc are all going to slow things down quite a bit. At least that's my didn't-go-further-that-grade-10-physics explanation of it anyway!

 

faces

There doesn't seem to be a lot of rhyme or reason to the latency Oceania gets to servers.

I get a ping of ~250ms to Duskwood using a command prompt (Stormstrike Battlegroup) and a 600-700ms ping in-game. At the same time, I only get a 280-320ms ping to Mal'ganis in-game, a server in the same Battlegroup. At first I assumed that Blizzard just threw more processing power/bandwidth at Mal'ganis because it's a lot busier than Duskwood, but apparently people from the US are getting awesome pings to Duskwood too.

If they're not intentionally dicking with higher-latency clients I can't think of any reason for the pings to differ that wildly. Ping times to non-WoW servers in similar locations are all 220-250ms, for reference, and using a proxy to connect definitely does reduce latency (easily noticeable when dropping from 650ms to 300ms).

Calens observations and questions seem very plausible.

That's pretty much the same experience I had (TPG Sydney) though I was connecting through a dedicated server (not lowerping.com). It does make a huge difference.

 

Oscarvil

Ok so I gave Lowerping.com a go this weekend using their free trial. I'm in Brisbane and I went from 400-600ms to 200-300ms (Quartz timing) on TPG internet (boo hiss).

I did experience a dropout every once in a while but I am not sure that is Lowerping, they seemed to be more frequent than usual but it may just have been selective memory making me think so. A friend of mine trialled with them at the same time and he (Melbourne) experienced similar ping to me but no dropouts.

I enjoyed immensely playing with ping close to 200ms. The charge on a single month basis so I'm going to give them a go, 7 bucks is a pretty good price for a much improved experience in Warcraft.

 

Cyn