There’s been a rather interesting issue I’ve had to fight with since… oh, since the Blood Wing went live in ICC.
See, this is what happens. Sometime between 6pm and 8pm, my latency will climb from where it usually sits (anywhere from 110-200ms, thank you ISP upgrades) to anywhere from 700ms to 17000ms. It will come back down to regular levels sometime between 11pm and midnight.
This is somewhat inconvenient, as this just so happens to be during peak times, when BG queues are at their fastest, and also when For Whom happens to raid.
Needless to say it is difficult to raid when you are rocking 5kms on boss fights.
Now, the interesting part comes in the details.
First, it is not simply bad lag. I am also disconnected very frequently in direct proportion to what is going on. Running around leveling a character in, say, the Arathi Highlands, I never get disconnected, whereas Wintergrasp features a disconnect roughly every twenty seconds.
Second, it isn’t my end of things either. I have a huge amount of evidence to support this.
One, the disconnects have nothing to do with my framerate. I can be in Wintergrasp with two raids all fighting in the same spot at 45 fps, and still get disconnected.
Two, I can have WoW and Ventrilo running, the WoW at 3k ms with frequent disconnects and the Ventrilo running at 80ms with zero issues.
Three, I’m the only one who can effectively experience the lag. I’ll explain.
I get this thing that happens. Everyone freezes in place, everyone runs on the spot, none of my buttons do anything. For all the world it looks like I’ve been disconnected from the server. Then, it is as if I had simply pushed the pause button, and now I pushed the fast forward button.
Usually, I’ll get the “yeah, I’ve probably been disconnected” behaviour for, say, fifteen seconds. Then, that fifteen seconds I miss plays on my screen extremely fast, fifteen seconds worth of events played out in super fast speed over about two seconds.
There’s also the odd behaviour where no one else can tell I’m lagging, because all my requests are reaching the server and being carried out fine. The problem is that none of that information gets back to me, on the client side.
For example, I’ll type something in guild chat. I push enter, and due to lag can’t see what I typed yet in the chat channel. Meanwhile, in vent, somebody responds to what I typed, and we can have a spoken conversation about what I typed up long before it ever appears in the chat channel on my end.
I’ll say “Ok, I’m casting Arcane Blast!”, push the button, someone on vent watching me says “yep, you casted it”, but on my screen my character is still standing there doing nothing.
As I said earlier, this has been going on since the Blood Wing was released, which has led to a huge amount of absolutely retarded wipes that can be blamed wholly and utterly on my inability to remain connected or respond to any boss mechanics.
Imagine trying to dodge the frozen explosion orbs on Sindragosa when you can only see them falling ten seconds after they’ve already landed and killed you.
You’ll notice a lot of people are having the same issue. You’ll notice they are posting tracerts. You’ll notice that nearly all of those tracerts have the exact same problem.
In nearly every tracert in that thread, everything seems fine until they reach a specific hop.
They either get to “mdf001c7613r0003-gig-10-1.lax1.attens.net [12.129.193.242]” and then timeout, or they get to “12.129.211.36 reports: Destination net unreachable.”
Of course, my own tracerts do the exact same thing. Everything is fine, everything is peachy keen, until I hit that attens.net part and then everything goes wrong.
Now that thread started off with people in New York with a specific provider, Optonline. However, people from as far flung places as Los Angeles, myself in western Canada, and even a guy in Bermuda are all having the exact same issue, namely they hit that attens.net part and it all goes to hell.
I am not a tech savvy person. Macros in WoW is about the extent of my programming ability, I didn’t even know what RAM was until grade eleven. I didn’t understand what a defrag was until a friend of mine gave me an excellent cookie analogy.
When I see tracerts from people all across North America running into problems at the exact same hop, every time, I don’t really know what’s going on. All I can say for sure is that there is absolutely no way this is a coincidence.
I’ve bumped that thread on the WoW forums a couple times, but so far no luck on Blizzard finding out what went wrong. Any ideas?
Anyway, I have (obviously) stepped out of raiding for the time being, which of course makes me sad, but wiping everyone else over and over is by far the worse option.
So I’ve spent a fair amount of time on alts these past few weeks. My Paladin is geared to the bloody teeth, but you can only go so far in arena as ret paladin/death knight/disc priest. It was fun, but a comp lacking crowd control and mortal strike was just immensely dumb.
But, hrm, you know what comp does work? HUNTER/death knight/disc priest. I mean it would be better with a paladin healer instead of a priest, but hunter/DK/healer-of-some-sort is infinitely better than the ghetto comp we were running before.
Problem is, the hunter was level 74…
Well, it’s 80 now, and boy oh boy do I have to get a lot of gear in order.
Hilariously, doing arenas armed with the account bound bow, equipped largely in blues and greens with 150 resilience, our team had way more success than we ever did as ret/dk/priest.
We lost way more games, yes, largely because the other team would see a hunter with 19k health fully buffed and go “EASY KILL OMFG” and then Lava Burst would crit me for 12k (oh how I wish I was joking) and that would be that.
The times I did survive was just hilarious. We’d fight, say, warrior/protret/tree, and the tree would do the following things:
- Can’t do that while stunned
- Can’t do that while silenced
- Can’t do that while disoriented
- Can’t do that while frozen in a block of ice -OH MY GOD TRINKET
- Can’t do that while silenced
- Can’t do that while feared
At which point the warrior would be dead because 25 seconds went by without a single heal being cast, and the protret was mildly upset because he never got to hit anyone with an attack due to being constantly snared and dispelled.
Should be better once I snag the 232 crossbow from Ick, and I’m also considering whether to ask the guild leader if I can bring my stupid hunter along for Lady Deathwhisper. A 251 bow that nobody else in the guild wants from an easy, farm content boss? Might be doable.
I am once again struck by the ridiculousness that all I need to do is raid a little bit to get a quality weapon for PvP.
I really think it might just be an issue with that datacenter. I used to be on a server in the LA Datacenter and frequently played, and raided (successfully, somehow) with 400-600ms lag.
All the time.
Forever.
I figured this was the norm!
Then I spent a few hours in the south end of things, on a server housed in the Dallas datacenter, and lo and behold, my lag dropped to about 80-100ms.
Then, at last, I switched back to my current server – also in LA, but on Central Time, which I quickly learned means neither jack nor squat, because I had 600ms lag again.
I finally ended up signing up with Reduce the Lag not long after they launched (http://reducethelag.com/ – it’s meant for those poor bastards in Australia playing on “Oceanic” servers that are actually in LA as well), and bam – ping times are a consistent 86ms. It rises to about 106ms during really, really busy periods.
I’ve disconnected all of twice without intentionally doing so, and one of those two times was during a fight where we vastly outgeared Yogg-Saron and I frankly wasn’t contributing much anyway.
So there’s a suggestion, I suppose – it runs as a background service, it’s not against the ToS, and it’s got a 30-day free trial, and maybe it’ll get you back to actively raiding.
Informative stuff: US datarealm list by datacenter — http://www.wowwiki.com/US_realm_list_by_datacenter
The last hop listed in your tracert is the last hop for a server in the LA datacenter.
Great catch Stop. So what this means is it’s perfectly normal/expected that your traceroute will give you an error on that last hop–Blizzard’s firewall is preventing you from hitting the server in the normal way traceroute tries to. Nothing to worry about.
Which is interesting, because Duskwood (my server) is supposed to be at the Boston datacenter.
Huh, yeah, you’re absolutely right. Duskwood’s in Stormstrike, Stormstrike’s in Boston – that last hop should be 12.130.0.174 or 12.130.0.170.
Well, I bet that’s a huge part of the lag, then: your connection’s being routed ’round the country.
Pinging us.logon would make sense that it would go basically wherever, but even pinging Duskwood direct results in the same thing, though oddly only sometimes.
Some tracerts go to Boston correctly, some don’t. It’s very strange. (the majority don’t)
400 is the norm for us australians with no dedicated server anywhere near us. What i wouldnt do to raid with 80 ms. Any spots in canada?
All the data centers are in Boston, LA, Dallas, and Seattle.
Sorry i ment any spots free to move to Canada. Better ms and a all round nicer place in my honest opinion.
Oh, lol. Yeah, for sure, move to Canada, we can never get enough Australians up here.
It will probably be colder overall, but far less poisonous animals.
reducethelag.com rocks, especially for aussies, but when i was in USA last month (colorado, with shitty snow mind you) I found that playing on LA servers RTL was still almost halving my ping from 160ish to a 90-100ish. Sure its not a huge difference its less than the blink of an eye, but you can feel it, and if it helps me save some nub from wiping the raid, then its worth it imo.
Have you tried using a latency reducing application – one that proxies? I think something like smoothPing might help, or if you setup your own proxy server that might help.
Sucks to have to do something like this to play – but it sounds like it’s an issue with an ISP somewhere, not with Blizzard’s servers.
Could it be a mod thing?
I’ve run the game without any mods activated or even installed with zero change.
Grimmtooth down below a ways says it might be somebody else’s addon spamming me, but that I’m not sure about. This whole lag thing happens whether I’m alone in Azshara with nobody in the guild online or in Isle of Conquest with thirteen guildies online.
I’ve been experiencing the same thing – where the game freezes, everyone runs in place, then ten seconds later it all catches up really fast – For the past year and three months. Ever since I got my new computer and moved it upstairs (the modem is downstairs). I had to use a USB wireless adapter, so I’ve always figured that it was the issue.
I don’t know much bout this tracert stuff so I can’t really say, but disconnecting on a Sapphiron fight or wiping the raid because I can’t get out of the fire on the ground because I can’t see it, is very frustrating. 😦
Really good point–wireless or wired to your home router?
Couple of questions: Windows or Mac? Have you rebooted? What kind of home router do you have, and have you power cycled it? What type of broadband do you have (cable, dsl, etc) and who is your provider? Do you have Vonage or other voip service, and if so, one of their routers?
Your problems sound like dropped packets and the delays are caused by the time required to retransmit. I wouldn’t worry about the tracert, that’s a red herring.
I’ve had good luck with this Windows registry change:
http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info13581-LeatrixLatencyFix.html
basically it changes how long Windows waits before sending a tcp ack. It’s perfectly safe and it can affect your wow traffic’s latency. Who knows? It might help you.
Wired, kind of. The internet comes inside to a Gateway, which is then plugged into the computer.
The connection itself is a laser dish outside to a central tower. Standard rural internet hookup. I’m somewhat limited in my upload/download compared to internet connections in the city, but it’s still high enough that it shouldn’t make a difference.
Windows. XP, to be specific. Yes, I’ve rebooted and restarted absolutely everything multiple times.
I (used to) use Skype, but stopped to see if that was an issue. It wasn’t, lag/disconnects just as bad.
Providers are these guys: http://www.shockware.com/
They are actually Telus, just under a different name. At my previous residence I used Telus, any lag above about 150 was insanely bad, disconnects were something that happened once a year.
I did the Windows registry change manually many months ago. It brought my latency from like 250-300 to 150-200, but I did that regedit before patch 3.2 was released. (An ISP upgrade right about when ToC hardmodes came out brought my ping down to the 110-200 I quoted in my post.)
If you say don’t worry about the tracert, I’ll believe you. I have no idea what is wrong here, all I know is that I can’t raid and this all started the Tuesday the Blood Wing in ICC became available.
Any findings? Honestly trying Reduce the Lag’s free 30 day trial seems like the best next step to troubleshoot. Who knows, Blizzard might have rolled something out in that patch that made it less tolerant of packet loss.
I work as a sr. systems administrator, I have equipment at a datacenter here in Irvine that Blizzard uses (I hear for authentication servers–not realms–but whatever it is they certainly have a shitton of systems). Actually, the data center doesn’t even acknowledge it’s Blizzard, they refer to them as “a large gaming company in Irvine”. It’s funny, they have huge cages with black tarp covering everything up so you can hardly see what they’re doing or what kind of equipment they have. Still I’m at least somewhat physically close to LA and maybe we can run some bandwidth/latency/jitter tests using iperf/jperf from your side to mine. If you’re experiencing packet loss it may only become a problem when their side gets busy. I’m curious to begin with but certainly don’t mind helping you as a small thank you for all your excellent articles. You have my email, email me direct if you’re interested in troubleshooting and running some tests.
I’ve had the same thing happen to me, it’s a real pain in the butt and I was wondering if it was shared by others. (I’m in Boston, playing on Illidan US, pretty decent connection).
It did have one amusing side effect – When I do 15 seconds worth of damage in 1 second, my dps jumps to a nice healthy ~25k 🙂
Are you on a congested rim? Could it be backhaul? Might explain why it happens at primetime each night. What does your ISP say?
My ISP has no idea what could be wrong. According to them the absolute highest pings I should ever see to any server in North America would be around 120ish.
They said it could be my equipment, which of course doesn’t explain why my Ventrilo ping never goes above 85ms.
As to congested RIM… maybe? I am unsure how to test that, or do you mean I should just ask my ISP that flat out?
Having somewhat insight on this matter I’d say that the ping you get on vent, doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the ping on WoW. They have completely separate functions and way of sending/recieving packets. The way i see it, it’s one of two things: Either it’s on your end(equipment, the dish solution might not be the best for online gaming.), or it’s the ISP’s routing that’s causing your trouble, you could ask them if they reroute during peak hours.
You should go to speedtest.net during the off-hours and peak-hours to see if there’s any difference in ping on various servers of your choosing during the two times. Cause that’s what is causing it, not the sending/receiving rate, but the delay on the packets, guaranteed.
-Trex
You’re fortunate your ISP even cares. My ISP stops all technical support at the point when I can load a webpage… no matter how many times I tell them that I don’t pay extra for their upgraded speed package so I can load webpages really fast. Apparently, if you can look at google.com, your internet connection is functioning as intended, no matter if your game disconnects every twenty seconds.
There is an addon that I used to use – FubarAddonSpam_Fu – that would tell you how much data channel traffic was going on. You could use it to see who was spamming the most data packets around you, for example. One of the biggest infractors was Corbomite – any time someone in my guild or in my party fired that up, I’d see silly huge numbers from them.
Where this is relevant: there appears to be some sort of protective “circuit” in the client or on the server that will shut things down if data channel usage gets excessive, up to and including being DCd.
I was having a lot of issues with that because one of my guildies was using Corbomite – when he left to jump servers and hang with his mates from work, I saw massive improvements.
I have been told that you can improve matters by /ignoring people that use addons that spam the data channels. So, in theory, the addonspam_fu addon can be used to scout out candidates, and then /ignore to see what happens.
The most intensive addons I use are Vuhdo and Pitbull4, and even then the vast majority of options those have are disabled. Vuhdo, for instance, only bothers with health bars, range, and debuffs, all the extra stuff (like tracking mana/threat/etc) are outright disabled.
Could be somebody else’s addon, I guess?
That’s what the addonspam thingy’s all about. It’s not so much your addons (you proved that by turning them all off) but what kind of congestion you’re seeing in the hidden data channels.
Corbomite?
Do you mean Carbonite?
‘Cause that thing sends and receives MASSIVE amounts of data (comparatively speaking), across multiple channels, on the default settings. I stopped using it once I figured that out.
(Also because dinging, and having it broadcast silently to one of my guildies, and having them congratulate me without me having said anything, was just plain creepy.)
@Stop – uh, yeah – sorry, my inner Trekkie reared its head there. You are correct – Carbonite.
Man, I somehow lost the reply I wrote and I am too tired to repeat it all.
This is what really helped me: http://www.dd-wrt.com/site/index. I have a Lynksys wireless (even though I am connected wired) router that serves up the other computers in my house. My wife and kids have computers as well. If you only have one computer running on your connection then you probably aren’t having buffer poroblems on you gateway. If you do then you might want to look into a firmware option that lets you set up QoS (quality of service) for your somcputer. Basically it makes sure that all the packets going to your computer have priority.
The other thing that was messing me up was leaving my feed reader open while I was playing. I have subscribed to way too many feeds and when it would update them all the game would freeze for a minute. Shutting that off as well as my email client, curse client or anything that would check for updates solved the rest of my problems.
Grimms right about addonspamfu, it rocks and will let you know how much information is being sent to your computer.
The big offender is GearScore. In a pug 25 where epeen is all important, everyone will be sending gs spam to each other as tehy are all running it. I have gotten as much as 15 megs sent to my computer per person. I don’t run with it anymore in raids.
Um, I actually had that exactly problem.
Mine was a memory fault.
As in, no joke, a memory fault.
I pulled out my memory.
Dusted it.
Put it back in.
WoW never ran smoother.
I can’t help you solve this, I don’t even know what a tracert is. But I can tell you I have the same symptoms on a European server – specifically, spikey lag in ICC that causes me to freeze and catch up again. And I’m not alone on my realm. It doesn’t happen anywhere else. Even in Dalaran, where it gets so bad I can disconnect two or three times just trying to log in, I never see the freeze issue — just bog-standard lag. So whatever it is, the common denominator is Blizzard. With my technical ignorance, I like to think it’s just caused by so many players using the same instance at once. could it be that simple?
Many in my guild experience transient latency that behaves just like this.
It’s worst on Wednesday during peak raid hours (EU raid reset being Weds).
I know it’s not my connection or PC setup and vent is happily sitting at 15ms! This weird lag happens with wow latency in the 100-200ms range and comes and goes for the whole raid at the same time.
Last night we nearly failed on gunship…
I have seen the same symptoms. though on my end it shows my latency at only 80-100 but it lags like none other, the whole raid feels its effects, but like you, if i’m careful I can actually continue my rotation by timing my casts to coincide with when I was supposed to cast them. Takes a bit of foresight and knowing your rotation well but it can work.
I am no computer expert but I had your identical problem. When i switched from a Wifi connection to an ethernet connection, however, the problem went away entirely and I now suffer no dcs ever.
I read somewhere that it had to do with the packet size getting sent to you during periods of high activity vs periods of low activity varied and was dcing people.
Maybe worth giving a non-wifi connection a shot if you are indeed using one 😦
As for your last thought, there is a thread going on in the PvP forums right now about weapons from BGs.
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=23425528169&sid=1
The main thought is, if Arenas are “Endgame” PvP as raids are “Endgame” PvE, and Heroics are “Intro” PvE where BGs are “Intro” PvE, why do all of these besides BGs give weapons? Nearly everyone who has posted agrees that furious weapons (iLevel 232) should be available for honor, even if it was the honor cap amount. It would be the same as say, Tyrannical Beheader or the Xbow from Krick (can’t remember the name), both iLevel 232.
I think the problem lies with Botters…
Felglacier Bolter, which I’ll probably get. I’m using the 200 epic from Utgarde Keep at the moment.
For the time being, play the hunter. I recently got my mage to 80 (this past Saturday) and you can see from his feed [http://www.wowarmory.com/character-feed.atom?r=Deathwing&cn=brokensword&filters=LOOT,RESPEC&itemLevel=200&locale=en_US] that he’s picked up a metric sh*t ton of loot in the past seven days (21 epics!). The gearing hill isn’t as high as it looks anymore.
One might think that alts are a safe place for refuge from this shitstorm of lag, but this is not entirely so.
On my 53 druid and 21 shaman, frequently, I will get disconnections after having died in a dungeon. running back to Ragefire Chasm whilst disconnecting every 4 seconds is an experience I never want to endure again.
Thankfully my shaman is ele, and can offheal quite well.
And my druid is a tank, who swipes just as hard as the next bear, and dodges nearly all incoming damage…. so deaths are uncommon.
By the way, I feel sorry for the horde in a way. The run back from Ragefire is almost as bad as the alliance taking 400ish damage at the start of WSG due to the fall length from our starting area. Horde do not deal with this.
The run back to RFC is pretty brutal, overall. Especially with a legitimate new lowbie group when 2 or 3 people get lost on the way there.
“…when 2 or 3 people get lost..”
YES.
This is a horror. People will fall into that lava and it consumes their life in seconds and body entirely upon death (making them un-targetable). And legitimate newbies are prone to release their spirit, making it impossible to resurrect them.
[…] Poor Rip… well poor all of us right now I think. I can assure you this crazy “lag fluctuation” is happening on this side of the world too. I conjured some food the other day.. some time later (a day or two maybe?) when I was at the bank the news floated across my screen to tell me I have just gained it… […]
Quote … “There’s been a rather interesting issue I’ve had to fight with since… oh, since the Blood Wing went live in ICC.
See, this is what happens. Sometime between 6pm and 8pm, my latency will climb from where it usually sits (anywhere from 110-200ms, thank you ISP upgrades) to anywhere from 700ms to 17000ms. It will come back down to regular levels sometime between 11pm and midnight.”
I’m having the exact same problem. I play from Victoria / Australia and as if paying for extra lower ping services isn’t enough now this has come along several weeks back.
Doesn’t matter what i do eg. restart router, computer, turn off addons, log in without smoothping, nothing works. I simply start lagging in wow at the same time and it goes on for hours till about midnight… EVERYNIGHT.
During the morning / early arvo there is no issues..then it all goes to sht. I’ve had enough of the BS that comes with trying to play this game competitively.
This issue is very specific happening between 5-12pm Oceanic server time.
It only seems to be happening to a few people or it would have been fixed by now. Very strange.
Just to clarify once more …. if your game is unplayable due to constant 1sec – 2sec ping spikes and DC’s between 5pm – 12pm (Oceanic ST) EVERY night but then goes back to normal for the rest of the day then you have the same issue.
Anything else is just your normal lag / dc everyone on the server gets from time to time or another issue unrelated to this.
Help !!! lol
[…] like Euripides seems to have once had, I can’t seem to get my computer to work at the same pace as the […]