World of Warcraft and Sprint USB U720 Latency / packet loss

feight · EVDO Fledgling Joined: 16 Apr 2007 Posts: 25

I've been beating my head against a rock here, Please if any of you have any idea that will help, please share.

I live real close to a tower and have a terrific signal. There is NO problems until I log into WoW. Then I can setup a ping on Yahoo and I will start to see packet loss, Also within warcraft I will notice 2-5000 latency after about 5-10 minutes. My Sprint connection reads perfect. I log out of warcraft and no packet loss and my ping times to Yahoo are all around 90-110.. great. But I can't play warcraft.

Sprint has mentioned in passing that they can't gaurantee lantency, only bandwith.

Things i've done to troubleshoot this:
Removed / disabled all firewalls and/or antivirus or any other overhead software
switched to a new computer, same problem
setup a new computer as a router, same problem
Prayed to the Nerd gods to fix my issue, to no avail
sacrificed a chicken

switching from the USB to the pcmcia version, would that matter or possibly help?

it seems as though ONLY world of warcraft doesn't work.. thanks kindly for any help guys.

lrosenbeck · EVDO Newbie Joined: 13 Feb 2006 Posts: 8

feight · EVDO Fledgling Joined: 16 Apr 2007 Posts: 25

I've done a test on the gateway while on wow.. two cmd prompts open with constant pings going to www.yahoo.com and my default gateway (sprint). The default gateway connection is perfect, but the yahoo pings fail while in WoW.

This tells me this is something in Sprints network. Any suggestions on what to do? Can I remap WoW ports or something? Proxy it someplace? Maybe i'll just setup a VPN through my office. Bah!

Devilmaji · EVDO Newbie Joined: 19 Apr 2007 Posts: 2

This isn't just Sprint , i am having the same problems with Verizon Crying or Very sad

feight · EVDO Fledgling Joined: 16 Apr 2007 Posts: 25

The technology is young, and perhaps I should be more understanding and just use a dial-up connection for my games. In time, I suspect EVDO will be enhanced to the point of it being viable for gaming. For now, i'll just wait.

krzy007 · EVDO User Joined: 23 Dec 2006 Posts: 45

Strange i play Everquest 2 and Ventrilo at same time done see pings going up high always at 140-170 ms .. i played Vanguard too no problems there as well

feight · EVDO Fledgling Joined: 16 Apr 2007 Posts: 25

Yeah.. I don't doubt it.. i'm right next to a tower.. but I bet that tower is a ways off from it's next hop.. I've done further testing.. it's not only in games.. my signal starts to drop packets whenever any amount of traffic goes through like streaming (video or audio), games, the more traffic the more packets start dropping.. my signal is pegged out.. 4-5 bars.. nothing else I think I can do. But I decided to buy a merlin 720 and a router and an external antenna. I'll see what happens.

slug · EVDO User Joined: 25 May 2005 Posts: 46

Im also having problems with high pings times on WOW. It started about 2-3 weeks ago, which is around the time REV. A was turned on.

feight · EVDO Fledgling Joined: 16 Apr 2007 Posts: 25

been about an hour now with no latency, no disconnects, and great gameplay.

Found a tunnel program and used it on a 2 day trial. So far it's perfect! Weeeee.. i'm such a geek

Brian · EVDO Newbie Joined: 23 Apr 2007 Posts: 1

We are currently using Windows XP with ICS to share the connection across two laptops, Verizon "unlimited", and a PC5750. We have had issues where gameplay is fine for a while and then latency climbs and we get packets backing up for 20 - 30 seconds, and then all of a sudden things happen. Yesterday we walked the laptop around and found that the location we were playing in was almost the worst in the house in that the signal just outside the wall/window nearest us would cut out several times a minute. So we removed the booster antenna and used the Windows Dial-Up connector and had a good couple hours last night. We have not totally root caused this as much of our experiences are anecdotal. We are going to move to the linksys router tomorrow so hopefully we will have a more stable connection and can debug from there.

feight · EVDO Fledgling Joined: 16 Apr 2007 Posts: 25

Well i've had a solid day of good gameplay and thought i'd post what fixed my problem as well as go into the details of it.

The Problem:
When I first log in to play, my connection is perfect. the latency would then increase the longer I play (increasing when I fight). I would get these long pauses where nothing would happen.. then everything would play "catchup". I assume this is some sort of traffic shaping done by Sprint.

The Solution:
a Tunneling program called "PingFu Iris". This basicly wraps world of warcraft in a package and sends everything out on port 80 (I think) and connects to one of their servers. Then, it does all the world of warcraft ports on the server end, bypassing any firewall / traffic shaping software.

After installing and playing for 4-5 hours and not seeing anything but green/yellow latency with my USB 720 sitting on the floor, i'm pleased. no long pauses at all.

Feight of Aggramar

feight · EVDO Fledgling Joined: 16 Apr 2007 Posts: 25

Forgot to mention PingFu has a 2 day trial. You can download it and give it a shot and pay nothing.

have to download a socks program along with PingFu, but it walks you through it, it also has settings for world of warcraft built into it.. so no techy stuff!

bbourdet · EVDO Fledgling Joined: 24 Jul 2007 Posts: 16

What socks program? I tried to use pingfu but everytime I try to log in to wow it can never authenticate... Any ideas?

KImholte · EVDO Fledgling Joined: 13 Feb 2008 Posts: 23

Feight,

Did you have issues running WoW during all times of the day? I've personally only having trouble during prime time hours so I think my issue is more related to the tower load on Sprint's end. During the morning for instance, I see much better gameplay and latency.

I'd like to know some more of your situation because I run MacOS, but this solution would require me to run Windows.

Thanks!

feight · EVDO Fledgling Joined: 16 Apr 2007 Posts: 25

well most ISPs these days use traffic shaping, this is a firewall type utility that prioritizes traffic. The WoW port (whichever one it is) is given a lesser priority than let's say port 80 (normal browsing traffic with internet explorer). When a tower or whatever the isp is using gets busy, this shaping device makes a decision on which traffic to allow and which to delay or que up.

WoW traffic is obviously delayed when everyone else is watching Youtube videos.

To fix this, we need to use a tunneling program and push our wow traffic through port 80 (the port that gets priority number 1). There are several out there for both pc and mac. Finding a good one is difficult, do your research.

This prevents the wow traffic from being que'd up, no long pauses.. no disconnects.. other than just the normal ones. Basicly for a mac.. i've no experience.. i'd guess there are tunneling programs for them however.