Australian and Oceania World of Warcraft customers have reported lag or high latency for years since the MMO service was available to them. A Representative from Internode – the first ADSL2+ provider in Australia – shared with their customers a software known as Freecap with an interesting configuration that allows World of Warcraft players in Australia to get at least 50% boost to their latency reception.
Various Australian players have reported they normally reach 600-800ms ping while playing World of Warcraft. Using the WoW Gateway configuration provided by internode on the freecap software made latency drop dramatically a 50%, as low as 284-350ms. Players say it now feels like instant-spellcasting is instant, as opposed to their normal experience, which is laggier. Example below provided by a Internode customer:
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Your ADSL connection type: ADSL2+ Internode (Low Latency port profile)
Your Sync speed: 17100k/929k
Your location: VIC, Windsor exchange
Average ping without using this service: 450-550ms
Average ping using this service (port 1080): 300-330ms
Average ping using this service (port 2080): 245-255ms
Windows XP, Proudmoore server.
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I invite all Australian folks to read all the posts, specially those from Windows XP and Vista users. You may find something useful to enhance your World of Warcraft experience on US Oceania Servers. If you are an Internode customer, your feedback – by posting your ping info – will allow Internode to optimize their WoW Gateway, which is a temporary solution or workaround until Blizzard is able to enhance the World of Warcraft code. Download Freecap software and follow the configuration instructions. Also provide your own ping feedback to help optimize the Gateway. Read all pages in both the following forums:
Internode Gateway Network and whirpool.net.au.
Mac OS X players go here after reading both forum links above. Then edit the tsocks.conf with Internode server settings and then launch wow using:
tsocks /Applications/World of Warcraft/World of Warcraft.app/Contents/MacOS/World of Warcraft &
Get the latest Darwin Ports here: darwinports.com
Additionally, the Internode representative revealed they have been in contact with Blizzard Entertainment providing feedback and analysis data. It seems there is faulty software code in World of Warcraft that causes the latency between Australia and United States server connections. Internode is confident that their assessment will allow Blizzard to enhance the game code resulting in better latency results.
So how is all this mumbo-jumbo important to non-Oceanic players? According to Internode, their analysis and consultancy offered to Blizzard Entertainment will benefit all 9.3 million World of Warcraft subscribers. Once Blizzard fix the faulty code, everyone around the world will have better latency overall.
Mark Newton – Internode ISP Representative: We’re helping our customers by running the gateway.
We’re helping our non-customers by urging our technical contacts inside Blizzard to fix their protocol (which, fwiw, isn’t hard, and can be done without breaking backwards compatibility). We’ve given them a full report of our observations and our assessment of the cause of the problem; MMC has put a lot of time into this over the last few days, after initially overcoming a somewhat skeptical internal reception.
We’re helping lowerping.com by… oh, hang on, we’re not helping lowerping.com. They might get upset when their income runs out after Blizzard has fixed the problem that caused them to spring into existence. We’re all a bit cut up about that.
Simon Hackett – Internode ISP Representative: Some status information so far:
– We think we’re on to something (and the feedback from many of you indicates the same)
– We’ve been putting a lot of high level staff effort into this, for all sorts of mutually reinforcing reasons, and its nice to see some results
– What you see right now is a *trial* server/service, and its performance is not guaranteed, and deeper, its not currently in the right city to provide optimal results for all players (specifically, as some have observed, east cost traffic is folding back via Adelaide right now). Thats ok, we have PoP’s all over the country, and in production we’ll put hardware in the best spots they can be in.
– The trial service (and by implication the production one) is configured to be accessible to Internode customers only. Thats logical, because we’re not charging anything for it, so obviously this is something (like many other offerings at Internode) that is in the package as part of our thanking you for choosing us.
This also means that if you want to access it from outside of Internode, you just need to churn to Internode first (which you can do online).
– What we believe, based on a lot of analysis so far (and that analysis is ongoing, by the way) is that we’re seeing a protocol bug in the Blizzard WoW code – a faulty interaction between the WoW client and the WoW server clusters. We’ve found a way to work around that faulty interaction. Its actually still happening, but with the configurations we’re trying, it happens in a way that no longer impacts latency during game play.
– Because we do have active network PoP’s all over Australia and in the USA, we can perfectly positioned (in a production version of this service) to generate pretty much ideal results for customers.
– The whole thing, again, appears to be working around a protocol bug. As such, we are using our contacts into Blizzard (which we have, obviously, due to our extensive game server efforts over time), to see if they’re able to address and (we hope) fix the issue. Because fixing the issue would then solve it globally – not just for people who become aware by whatever means that a workaround exists.
Meantime, what we might do for our own paying customers won’t actually have a lot of impact on people who might choose to charge money to do the same thing for customers of other ISPs (other than saving Internode customers’ money) – at least until the underlying bug gets fixed, when the whole thing, for everyone, would become un-necessary.
This remains a work in progress, but your (constructive) feedback is welcome.
Thanks, Floranitis @ Blackrock
