For those of us playing World of Warcraft from Australia, most of us have been pretty used to in game latency in the range of 400 to 600ms or so, even though if you were to actually ping the servers you'd see values closer to 200ms.

There's a couple of places that have tried setting up SSH tunnels with a server located in the US that you proxy your WoW connection through (for example lowerping.com) and while not everyone seems to benefit there's been a lot of people that have reported success in it successfully dropping their in game latency to around 200ms, i.e. what you'd expect given an out of game ping.

Now these sites alas usually charge for the service (I mean sure, it's not exactly free to run a server in the US, but yeah, they're charging more than they need to cover costs, but that's not a problem).

Anyway, recently the folks over at Internode have been investigating the issue and they've found what they think is a flaw in Blizzard's network protocol for WoW which is causing this issue.

They've set up their own (it's under 24 hours old, so it's still in development, trial, etc) proxy (doesn't tunnel with SSH) for Internode customers.

The reports of Node customers that have used this also shows drops in latency, though not as much as lowerping.com usually, but that's because they're still actively tweaking stuff and they're only using 1 test server currently and it's located in Adelaide.

They've also contacted Blizzard with their connections as a game hosting site etc, so hopefully Blizzard will get around to fixing the underlying issue.

But even if they don't, for Aussie WoW players it looks like the days of stupidly high latency for no good reason may be over soon (for no cost for a Node customer, and for a relatively cheap cost if you go through lowerping.com etc).

For the whirlpool discussion link is here.

Damn.. I got the guy that runs lowerping onto this whole tunnel thing a few months ago and now it's bloody everywhere.

Also, FWIW - you can chip together with your mates and get a VPS from qauntact for $8/mth that you can do all this proxy tunnelling stuff through.

Yeah I was considering just getting an account set up on a US shell server myself, but I'm with Internode so I think I'll just wait for them to get their thing finalised.

That said I use Vista 64 and apparently Freecap doesn't work with it, so I apparently need to use something like Proxycap which is Shareware with a limited trial etc.

yeah, one of my ex guildies has his own tunnel thing set up for this, he's just fixing it all up too

and a guildie of mine also got me onto lowerping.com

i havent got either yet, gonna see if the first guys one works ok coz he will give it to us for like 1 dollar a month :)

Freecap works, you just have to edit the program settings so that all the tick boxes under "Program Settings" are unchecked.

edit: It works, my ping through my ISP was/is 800+ but using an SSH tunnel it's about 220-240ms. You don't need to setup a SOCKS server either.

I was talking to someone who did some testing and fiddling and apparently even just tunneling to a machine on your own network using ssh will reduce your ping, so I've heard...

Ticman: I was led to believe that Freecap will work on Vista 32 if you uncheck all the programs or whatever, but doesn't on Vista 64.

Nada, exit point for traffic has to be in the US. Basically the problem is that one of the international carriers/suppliers of bandwidth is de-prioritising WoW traffic (whether it's on purpose or being mislabelled is unknown).

All an SSH tunnel does is encrypt the traffic the same way you can enable encryption on torrents and get better results. By encrypting the traffic from here to the US they can't see what's in the packets and therefore leave it as a normal priority which means lower pings.

imagine how you would feel if you actually paid money for a service and then the company that ran the service didn't care enough to set up local servers and then to top it all off, had a flaw in their network code that meant players that are forced to play on servers on the other side of the world get crap pings.

can you just imagine?

TicMan, that's not what Internode are saying.

They're saying there's a problem with the protocol. That it's got nothing to do with network congestion or traffic deprioritization etc.

Their test server is located in Adelaide, not the US.
(The reason why people are getting higher pings through it than lowerping.com is of course that with the test server in Adelaide people in say Brisbane, have an extra jump to and from Adelaide on their traffic route which'll add 60 to 100ms maybe).

They're quite adamant that it's got nothing to do with prioritization.

Ara: Blizzard were interested in setting up Aussie servers (or at least were looking at the practicality of it). When they found out how much we pay for bandwidth here, they changed their minds.

As for the protocol issues....If Blizzard don't do anything about the problem then yeah....that'd be pretty lame. But if they fix it, then eh, would be a shame that it's been 3 years since release, but at least it'll be fixed now.

When they found out how much we pay for bandwidth here, they changed their minds.

I think I can state pretty confidently that if they wanted to host servers in Australia, a way could be found that meant they didn't have to worry about bandwidth costs.

Internode are wrong IMO. Their test server may be located in Adelaide but you'll notice it's using a SOCKS5 setup which can easily be configured to connect to an upstream proxy in the US over an encrypted link. It may not be prioritization in the Internode network, but someone upstream is doing it (think Reach/Singtel/Level3/etc).

I would say it's a fairly safe bet that since there's 9mil+ subscribers from all around the world that the networking protocol is well established, tested and used. 3yrs on and someone decides to highlight that it's a problem with the protocol is a bit of a dodgy explanation.

I dunno. That was the scuttlebutt at the time around release.

Maybe there were other reasons.

With the number of Oceanic servers now and with how busy they are, it's possible they may at some point reconsider if they can find suitable hosting.

That said, if they fix this bug, they may decide that it's a big enough of an improvement to Oceanic players to make it not worthwhile for the near future.

They're pretty confident it's a protocol issue of some sort, to the extent of supposedly having identified the exact problem and told Blizzard what it is and demonstrated it to themselves that this is the cause.

Their connection isn't encrypted either, though yes, they do benefit from having end to end control of their international link.

When they found out how much we pay for bandwidth here, they changed their minds.

I don't know who fed you that line but from my knowledge that is completely incorrect.

"When they found out how much we pay for bandwidth here, they changed their minds."


That's exactly how i heard it went down.

+1 this thread

There's something bs going on, just ssh tunneled through my file server and literally took 50ms off my latency :S

Why the f*** do you guys continue to support a gaming system that ignores your need for a local server?

I just don't get it

Because it's not such a big deal to me. I haven't found one MMO that has an Australian server - even ones developed by Brisbane based software companies that had their peak in the late 90s.

I always get between 250 and 400 for my WoW ping. Works alright for me but I admit in the last couple of days the lag was really bad but that may have had something to with the borked pipeline thingy the other day.

Actually, I'm on WoW atm and my ping is sitting at 260 in the green.

Why the f*** do you guys continue to support a gaming system that ignores your need for a local server?

I just don't get it

Why does everyone keep bitching about "needing" a local server for a game like WoW? After all my time playing MMOs, I can confidently say that the amount of times where I said to myself "f*** I wish I had a lower ping" I can count on one hand - and all of those times, I was playing DAoC not WoW. High pings are s***ty in fps', but I don't think it's really that crucial for WoW. When you consider that the total amount of active, Australian WoW players would probably make up less than a quarter of the population of one of the major American cities, and that it's perfectly playable with our current pings, it doesn't really make sense for Blizzard to give us an Aussie-Only server (even though it would be cool).

Stop making a mountain out of a molehill though. You know as well as I do that the game is perfectly playable as it is at the moment. If there's one thing I've learnt from my time of playing MMOs, it's that MMO players, for some reason, love to whinge about everything.

Pings are important in the PVP aspect, simply because whoever has the lower latency has the better chance. However I do pretty well in Battlegrounds and Arena and my ping is around 400 - 600ms. Get a decent provider maybe :P

In wow doing pvp (arena) instead of pve I sure wish I had a lower ping. But thats the only time.

That internode thing is pretty sweet, my ping is usually around 350 - 400ms and using that internode thing I get 230 - 270ms.

I've said it before and i'll say it again. I don't support the whole Aussie server concept but it's not because of the pings. I don't really support any localised servers. What it comes down to for me is Time Zones.

By and large people will generally play the game at the same time locally everywhere. So roughly 7pm-11pm locally in every time zone is going to have a boom(small or large depending on the population in that area). So long as for the most part these 7-11s overlap your game will be relatively well populated. The problem is when you have a massive time zone gap as when the population of one time zone is waning there's no-one to take up the slack.

The problem is even worse on the "local" end, your server is really only well populated during your own peak period. Localised servers would mean nothing for australian shift workers because the server would always be empty for them.

I first noticed this in planetside(which had Euro servers) that when 11pm AEST came around the game was empty. Literally empty.

I don't mind the asian ones because the language barrier is a big f***ing deal. With that exception though i think you get a better utilization of server by having global servers.

If its that important i'd be more interested in doing enough research to work out the best link from a region to the proper game servers and setting up a local proxy server(idea being if you have <50ms to the local proxy and the shortest path possible from the local proxy to the global servers then your ping will be minimized). In the end you'd get mostly the same effect as local servers for mostly the same effort and cost but without the dead time zone effect.

Pings are important in the PVP aspect, simply because whoever has the lower latency has the better chance.

From what i'm told the main reason you want low pings is for interrupts. If you have 1s pings then you're not going to be able to interrupt 1s activation time spells without guesswork.

i just spam kick whenever it isn't on cooldown and it always interrupts something :)

my ping varies from 210ms -> 500ms, only when it goes over 500ms does it effect my gameplay, and that is rare and due to server or isp problems..

lol mate got banned yesterday for having it. they said they thought he was paying someone to lvl for him. because of the latency drop. lol gl hf 3 day ban, next time he has a ping so low . again they will blacklist ban him. which is stupid they ban first, ask questions later.

and how do i get the internode one. cause i with internode.

so you get banned for having a low ping.... ?

its hard to explain when you pay someone to lvl for you forgot what there called. your ping drops extremly low for some reason but because they saw his ping for from 450-150 and stay there. they thought he was paying someone to play for him. they ban first ask questions later. which is a stupid strategy. but its fine hes getting his account back tomorrow. dw you probably wont get ban, he was just probably unlucky because of the mix up.

Yeah, sometimes they ban you if your IP drastically changes too because they think its someone else playing (or someone is powerlevelling you). Guy in my guild got banned when he played his account at uni because the university had some weird IP range that was really different than his home IP.

As for how to get the Internode thing, go to the whirlpool link in Rukh's post and click the link in the first post in the whirlpool thread.

you pay to play that s*** every month, you should be able to let whoever the f*** you want play on your account and from where ever the f*** you want

Heh its against the ToS to let anyone other than a minor child play your account. This includes spouses haha.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=3271071466&sid=1

info on this, apparently it's all about s***ty ack replies. So as long as you tunnel somewhere that sets TCP_NODELAY you'll get (so they say) a better ping.

lowerping is really really.. goood

i went from 500-600 ping down to 200... so u can hit s*** as melee .. it's kinda weird

My understanding is that lower ping makes it look like you're on some kind of a lan IP. So when blizzard is monitoring they see 20+ people using the same IP and think its leveling service. As such some people leveling characters on lower ping are getting bans however level 70s that are using it aren't having this problem.

There's a reg setting you can change in XP to always send an ack or something, I can't remember what it is at the moment but I'll post it later if nobody else does. Obes tested it last night and was getting around 100ms less than the PC sitting next to him that hadn't had the change done yet.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=3271071466&sid=1

Jesus thats a f***ing painful solution, proxy/freecap is much nicer.

My understanding is that lower ping makes it look like you're on some kind of a lan IP

It will make it look like you and the other people using lowerping have the same IP as you're all tunnelling to the same server in the US.

Edit: last night I fired up WoW on my laptop where I don't have putty/freecap installed and my ping was 13,000+. Setup the tunnel stuff and it was back to 220ms. I still think one of the upstream providers is wrongly prioritising traffic as the ack thing couldn't add that much extra latency.

last edited by TicMan at 16:00:56 10/Dec/07

Edit: I take it back, looks like it is this Nagle's Algorithim in the TCP stack. It just so happens the default option in putty is to disable it.

last edited by TicMan at 16:59:50 10/Dec/07

last edited by TicMan at 17:01:52 10/Dec/07

New registry entry for controlling the TCP Acknowledgment (ACK) behavior in Windows XP and in Windows Server 2003

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/328890

Interesting...

Typically, an acknowledgment is sent for every other TCP segment that is received on a connection unless the delayed ACK timer (200 milliseconds) expires. You can adjust the delayed ACK timer by editing the following registry entry.

It's dropping the ball a bit to use TCP and then not to remove that.

I've setup a similiar proxy thing to Internode on my own US server. It's a modified version of SS5 (Socks Server 5) where I've just set the socket option to disable Nagles.

PM me your IP if you want to test it out.

I'll put the details of setting up Freecap here so I don't have keep repeating myself in PMs :)

1) Download and install Freecap from http://www.freecap.ru/eng/?p=download

2) Configure these settings under "Proxy Settings" tab
Server: Will be PM'd
Port: 1080
Protocol: Socks v5 (with your username & password for auth which in PM)

Goto the "Program" tab and remove all tick boxes.

Add a new application being your WoW.exe file.

3) Launch WoW from within Freecap and report back what you find.

Using Ticman's server my ping has gone from around 500 down to 260-310. So definitely an improvement there.

I get a 'Disconnected from server' as soon as I type my WoW password and hit enter. something wrong with my computer?

I get a 'Disconnected from server' as soon as I type my WoW password and hit enter. something wrong with my computer?

ticman now has your username and password

omg i got owned =/

and I get 181 ping from 450

great improvement!

but I got owned =/

last edited by burningcow at 18:45:22 13/Dec/07

ticman now has your username and password

That was plan all along boba! You only need to worry if you're alliance though, then you'll have her s*** sharded and auctioned with the gold transferred to my asian farming friends.

awesome ~250 down from ~400

edit: down to 200 now =)

last edited by kappa| at 20:13:18 13/Dec/07

I'm getting the same results as deep. Seems to be working like a charm ;)

I have tried a few other methods but so far this has proven the most successful. I use the addon "quartz" which shows you latency for each spell cast, and it generally sits between 250 and 310. I'm on iinet adsl2+.

starting from today when i use TicMan's server i get stuck in the 'authenticating' messege =/

reading at the end of the link posted to blizard forums, seems like blizzard are already trialing the fix on the test realms.

Bottom of general section
"Reduced network latency by disabling the Nagle algorithm."

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/test-realm-patchnotes.html

To think that people would pay a monthly fee, then pay for in-game gold using real money and if thats NOT enough, they go and pay to lower their ping?

My only response is ....

Hey champs, I'm changing the rules - you can only get a proxy account thingimajig if you're a regular poster (ie: you didn't just sign up to QGL to get a lower ping from me).

Hey champs, I'm changing the rules - you can only get a proxy account thingimajig if you're a regular poster (ie: you didn't just sign up to QGL to get a lower ping from me).

aww i did T.T
i really want low ping

aww i did T.T
i really want low ping

wait for the next patch "Reduced network latency by disabling the Nagle algorithm."

I've recently stumbled across a site called Gamepath ( http://www.gamepath.net) that is similar to Lowerping. Does anyone have any experience with it? Is it better?

I'm running the trial account on it and it's been good so far. About 180ms, how does that compare with Lowerping? Anyone able to do a comparison as I do not have a Lowerping account.

Theres also http://pingbetter.co.nz/

I haven't used it, but some people in my guild use it and say its pretty good.

ticman needs to set his proxy up to work with war =P

Let me know what ports it uses boba and I'll open them up.

The IP ban comes not from having a lower ping but from a number of factors, Number of various accounts connecting from the same address (but netcafe's do this too so its not the main reason) but its the tracker that monitors the history of your user logins, the moment you change from an IP that responds to an australian registered netblock and it changes continients to USA/china/korea and it still connects to the US/oceania servers it flags as a potentially compromised account.

heh

thanks catherine i'll be right there @!!!!1

Not even QGL is safe from WoW china farmers!

Stop bumping so many old threads ffs.

Please key log me!