So about 6 weeks ago my regular ping of around 500 jumped upto 700ms. From there it only got worse when it moved up to around the 900ms mark over the preceeding weeks. No changes in my config at home, bandwidth tests were still showing good results and the porn was downloading at full speed.

So I started down the path of trouble shooting with the ISP & Blizzard and after quite a long time of throwing traceroutes around, changing settings, etc nothing changed. Blizzard are blaming the ISP and the ISP are blaming Blizzard. I posted on Whirlpool about it and slowly up popped quite a few other users with the same problem with my ISP and with other ISPs like Internode and iiNet. Broadening the search abit I started to see a lot of people from all ove Asia-Pac with the same problem whether they are in Singapore, Auckland, Perth or wherever - the common problem of a sudden ping increase upto around 1000ms. I resigned to the fact it was f***ed until I had a brain wave!!@$

I have a US Linux box so I setup a SOCKS server on that, created an SSH tunnel and used a program called SocksCap to wrap the WoW network traffic through the tunnel and it pops out at the SOCKS server in the US. Introducing a hop count of 32 instead of 15 going direct to Blizzard AND the overhead of the encrypted traffic, you would presume that the ping would go higher. However the reverse happened, in fact it reversed so much I now have a constant green ping with the occasional dip into orange. That's around 280ms->300ms.

If I disable SocksCap and go direct it's back upto 1000ms. I've done this with 2 machines at home and with a friend who plays WoW and the results are the same. Instant drop down to < 300ms.

So if you're having latency problems then you could give this a shot, US shell accounts are cheap to come by and probably < $5/mth for access. I haven't tried it with any other network based games where servers are based in the US but I'd presume the results would be the same.

For all the network gurus here, what's your take on the situation? Personally it sounds like an upstream provider has borked their traffic prioritisation but since SSH traffic is usually set to a priority then it's all flowing down the tubes without a problem. I'd be interested to see what people think.

Cheers

i wouldn't say borked, it just sounds like someone has de-prioritized either all games, or wow specific, traffic that your ISP goes through.

That or unless you are playing on an "oceania" desginated server, blizzared are prioritising american traffic?

I play on Spinebreaker, but it happens on Frostmourne, Tharussian (spelling?) and Blackrock. Without the SSH tunnel the ping is up near 1000ms, with the tunnel its down to < 300ms.

I haven't seen traceroutes from the other ISPs but it's a good possibility, FWIW the traffic goes aaNet -> Optus -> Savvis -> AT&T.

traceroute to 63.241.255.52 (63.241.255.52), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 gw (192.168.1.1) 2.135 ms 2.515 ms 3.009 ms
2 lo1.core-r1.qld01.aanet.com.au (202.63.43.2) 36.446 ms 40.041 ms 43.030 ms
3 aanet-gw.eftel.com.au (202.76.136.145) 46.101 ms 50.010 ms 53.920 ms
4 VLAN314.14vrc76f06.optus.net.au (203.202.78.145) 59.083 ms 63.608 ms 65.273 ms
5 203.208.148.17 (203.208.148.17) 239.568 ms 243.433 ms 245.944 ms
6 ber1-ge-4-16.losangeles.savvis.net (208.173.157.9) 256.456 ms 255.626 ms 258.342 ms
7 cr1-loopback.lay.savvis.net (208.172.34.70) 266.641 ms 217.929 ms 223.276 ms
8 dcr2-so-3-3-0.dallas.savvis.net (204.70.192.246) 249.300 ms 252.724 ms 256.374 ms
9 bcr2-so-1-0-0.Dallas.savvis.net (204.70.193.21) 259.923 ms 262.149 ms 266.102 ms
10 savvis-gw.dlstx02ck4.ip.att.net (208.172.139.226) 262.574 ms 229.581 ms 229.530 ms
11 tbr1.dlstx.ip.att.net (12.122.86.206) 235.719 ms 238.585 ms 240.998 ms
12 br2.dlstx.ip.att.net (12.123.16.209) 244.809 ms 247.590 ms 251.577 ms
13 12.122.255.226 (12.122.255.226) 256.447 ms 230.724 ms 234.388 ms
14 mdf001c7613r0004-gig-12-1.dal1.attens.net (63.241.193.14) 237.939 ms 240.592 ms 245.358 ms
15 * * *

delete your characters and cancel.

Just for your reference TicMan, this is from works Optus dsl

Target Name: N/A

         IP: 63.241.255.52

  Date/Time: 7/08/2007 12:19:01 PM



 1    0 ms    0 ms  [192.168.0.254]

 2   24 ms   25 ms  dslgw-211.29.137.8.optusnet.com.au [211.29.137.8]

 3   32 ms   24 ms  mas4-vl600.gw.optusnet.com.au [211.29.137.2]

 4   25 ms   24 ms  mas1-ge9-0.gw.optusnet.com.au [211.29.129.33]

 5   32 ms   25 ms  sbr3-ge5-0-0-811.gw.optusnet.com.au [211.29.155.12]

 6  188 ms  183 ms  [203.208.148.225]

 7  187 ms  182 ms  bpr1-ge-4-3-0.PaloAltoPaix.savvis.net [206.24.241.93]

 8  N/A     185 ms  dcr1-so-1-0-0.sanfranciscosfo.savvis.net [204.70.194.74]

 9  185 ms  184 ms  dcr2-so-5-0-0.SanFranciscosfo.savvis.net [204.70.192.150]

10  226 ms  226 ms  dcr1-so-2-0-0.LosAngeles.savvis.net [204.70.192.89]

11  225 ms  226 ms  dcr2-so-1-3-0.dallas.savvis.net [204.70.192.250]

12  N/A     226 ms  bcr2-so-1-0-0.Dallas.savvis.net [204.70.193.21]

13  N/A     226 ms  savvis-gw.dlstx02ck4.ip.att.net [208.172.139.226]

14  N/A     224 ms  gr1-a3110s2.dlstx.ip.att.net [192.205.33.133]

15  N/A     232 ms  br2.dlstx.ip.att.net [12.123.16.213]

16  N/A     224 ms  br2.dlstx.ip.att.net [12.123.16.213]

17  225 ms  224 ms  mdf001c7613r0003-gig-10-1.dal1.attens.net [63.241.193.10]

18  232 ms  225 ms  mdf001c7613r0003-gig-10-1.dal1.attens.net [63.241.193.10]

19   *       *       [-]

20   *       *       [-]



Destination not reached in 35 hops

last edited by reso at 12:21:14 07/Aug/07

/quit life

or /quit drivingcarsintopoles ?

Post was merely to provide those out there with an alternative to high s***ty pings.

So basically certain ISPs are being dicks and giving traffic on the WoW ports low priority or simply throttling traffic to those ports, and refusing to own up.

Nice.

isp's have also realised that wow is s***

suck it

haha, i agree 100% with pave

its a sign to be less of a loser and start living again

just quit wow and start enjoying life.

So because you play WoW you have no life, loser and so on? So if I quit how do I get all those things back?

Plus the bitches don't like it. read now!

So basically certain ISPs are being dicks and giving traffic on the WoW ports low priority or simply throttling traffic to those ports, and refusing to own up.

If they're throttling and de-prioristing wow, you can bet they're throttling and de-prioritising other games too, since nearly any FPS released in the last 5 years would use more bandwidth than wow does.

CityKat is indeed a hottie, kinda reminds me of Hariet/Harriot/Harriet/Hariot from Studio 60.

If they're throttling and de-prioristing wow, you can bet they're throttling and de-prioritising other games too, since nearly any FPS released in the last 5 years would use more bandwidth than wow does.

But FPS' typically have decentralised server hosting, and provide source binaries for their servers.

People tend to pick domestic servers for their FPSing - from what I understand of it (which is not to say a LOT), network traffic to the States is much more expensive than domestic.

It's common practise that SSL and most encrypted tunnels are given higher priority then other traffic because 80% of that data is commerical/business related.

It's also common knowledge that due to the way the packet sizes are decreased due to multiplexing and other goodies when tunneling through encryption your packets can get joined to other weird sized packets and therefore get ahead in the queue. Much like a roller coaster carny asking if there is '1 person' to fill the last spot on a roller coaster.

Cheers for the info. I used to have this problem a long time ago with optus where ping times to the US would reach 600+ every night at 6:30ish and continue like that till late. No doubt it was an issue with the increased traffic at that time. But yeah, interesting to actually see a solution.

It's hardly a solution. Most people running 56k cannot afford the bandwidth to setup a solution like this and most of all, who has a spare linux box in the US that they can slap random wow latency enhancing services on? Most IT professionals with boxes in the US wouldnt dream of touching them to help with their games latency...

Most people running 56k cannot

What year is it, 1990?

Plus the bitches don't like it. read now!

If she was a decent girlfriend, she woulda realised the importance of this game, rolled a priest, and enjoyed the online sensation by his side.

How selfish can a dumb slut be? Learn to spent time with your boyfriend. No wonder she got her sorry arse dumped.

you ever wonder why you can't hold down a girlfriend?

If you have been following any of the blizzard dev's blogs you would remember reading about how even, six months ago, they refused to increase the number of npc's throughout certain areas and also came to the conclusion that implimenting physics to the wow engine would be a disaster due to the fact that 1/3 (33%) of people who play wow play on dialup 56k or slower.

Plus the bitches don't like it. read now!

My Girly likes it. We probably play WoW 5 hours a week all up, maybe. Some weeks more, others less. Spend more time watching sci-fi stuff tho, onto the last season of Farscape. Wooo.

Enjoy!

pics of her playing WoW or lying!

you ever wonder why you can't hold down a girlfriend?

Isnt that rape?

Only when they sue.

who has a spare linux box in the US that they can slap random wow latency enhancing services on?

Only US$29/mth for my dedicated server (www.serverpronto.com), you are right though I wouldnt' put anything like this on a server to do with work. You could probably find a shell account for cheaper that might have a SOCKS server installed.

$30/mnth For a min ping of 300 ? you moss well be on 1000. The sweet spot in most online games is about 150ms... below that you hardly notice lag. When I went to the US I was playing in wireless broadband with a ping of only 23ms and because of that I won way more pvp battles and did loads more damage.

Non australian wow servers is the stupidest thing about blizzard games. Good thing they can be copied file for file and run instantly on another PC with nothing more then an iso and a .reg dump. Also the alt+tab and scaleability of their software is amazing. They are the id software of the rps/rpg world imo. So many lans have been saved because some patch didnt work on someones computer or some game f'ed up etc and blizzard has come and saved the day with one of its, copy+mount+play games. I'm yet to see someone who doesnt run mounted iso+crack for most games despite us all owning our legit copies.

$30/mth for web & email hosting, this WoW stuff is just a side bonus. You can find SOCKS or SSH hosts for around $5/mth.

The sweet spot in most online games is about 150ms... below that you hardly notice lag. When I went to the US I was playing in wireless broadband with a ping of only 23ms and because of that I won way more pvp battles and did loads more damage.

So the sweet spot is 150ms, except that you rape more when your ping is even less?

WTS 70 Troll Warrior 3/5 tier4, 2/5 season 2 arena gear, many a karazhan loots PST!

bah has rape on the brain