Europe / German Server Ping Rates

[nobbie]

I would like to ask here in an independent forum what the other European - and especially German - players have as average ping rates during the usual peak times (late afternoon, evening and the weekends).

Me, and a lot other people are experiencing horrible latency times (2000-3000 ms and more) and lags (10000-15000 and more) across all German realms for about 2-3 weeks now. Blizzard said that they "are working on a solution", but we haven't noticed anything but rather lame excuses so far, i.e. "it's, among other things, a problem of a big German provider yaddayadda ...".

So, what are your ping rates, and a question for the U.S. players here in this forum: Do or did you have similar latency/lag problems, and if, what did Blizzard do about them?

[Flymo]

My ping from the UK is 15-40 ms at peak times. On the occasions when my latency bar has gone amber or red the cause has always turned out to be either someone hammering my local network, e.g. a member of the family trying to download the whole of Naruto, or my ISP (I have access to two so it's easy to establish that is the problem by changing to the other).

I'd suggest pinging other sites to see if they have high latency too. If so, it's not Blizzard's fault.

[Quark]

I'd suggest pinging other sites to see if they have high latency too.  If so, it's not Blizzard's fault.
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Better yet, learn to use tracert. Use it to find where the bottleneck is, and from there it can be made easier to determine who owns the crappy parts :)

[Roland]

I would like to ask here in an independent forum what the other European - and especially German - players have as average ping rates during the usual peak times (late afternoon, evening and the weekends).

Me, and a lot other people are experiencing horrible latency times (2000-3000 ms and more) and lags (10000-15000 and more) across all German realms for about 2-3 weeks now. Blizzard said that they "are working on a solution", but we haven't noticed anything but rather lame excuses so far, i.e. "it's, among other things, a problem of a big German provider  yaddayadda ...".

So, what are your ping rates, and a question for the U.S. players here in this forum: Do or did you have similar latency/lag problems, and if, what did Blizzard do about them?
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Blizzard has had problems in the past with their ISPs, most notably AT&T on either USWest or USEast, I can't recall which (think it was West). This was during D2. So it's entirely possible.

As for lack States-side, I don't recall much, if any, due to ping, other than the server itself being HAMMERED by a flood of players. ;)

My guess would be that it is indeed an ISP issue, not Blizzard, which would also explain the tardy fixes, as it would be out of Blizzard's hands.

[lfd]

Better yet, learn to use tracert.  Use it to find where the bottleneck is, and from there it can be made easier to determine who owns the crappy parts :)
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Telia. It's always, without fail, Telia. And Blizzard still accuse everybody else's ISPs, even though it's always parts of Telia's network that are sucking.

[nobbie]

According to this article of the German PC magazine "c't", there's obvioulsy a "provider war" in France regarding the Internet peering going on, and as we all know, the central WOW support is in France and now most likely negatively affected by that "war". It's furthermore interesting that this article is dated October 6, 2005, which is exactly the time when the huge ping and lag problems began ...

We'll see how Blizzard will handle this, because I couldn't read anything about a "provider war" in the subscription contract I have signed, and for which I pay 13 Euro/month. That's what you get when you're always looking at the cheapest Internet provider solution. Why no independent WOW support and data centers in every main European country (Germany, France, England) when you earn so much money with WOW?

[savaughn]

We'll see how Blizzard will handle this, because I couldn't read anything about a "provider war" in the subscription contract I have signed, and for which I pay 13 Euro/month. That's what you get when you're always looking at the cheapest Internet provider solution. Why no independent WOW support and data centers in every main European country (Germany, France, England) when you earn so much money with WOW?
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Really? I found it in mine almost immediately:

Blizzard Entertainment shall not be held liable for any delay or failure to perform under any circumstances, including without limitation those resulting from causes outside the reasonable control of Blizzard Entertainment; including without limitation any failure to perform hereunder due to unforeseen circumstances or cause beyond Blizzard Entertainment's control such as acts of God, war, terrorism, riots, embargoes, acts of civil or military authorities, fire, floods, accidents, strikes, or shortages of transportation facilities, fuel, energy, labor or materials.

[Lord_Olf]

Hail Nobbie,

as for my ping rates, I'm none too sure, since it usually feels higher than what the indicator tells me.

Yesterday, I went thorugh Razorfen with a group, and playing was most tedious. My instant spells (I was playing my mage) seemed to have a casting time of 2-3 seconds, lag was very bad and three seperate people lost their server connection at different times.

Well, this I could accept, since it was peak hour, we started the instance at about 8 PM. But what really galls me is the fact that the latency / ping is not only bad at peak time, but also during the day, Mail takes very long, even selling to vendors is laggy, and that shouldn't, imho, be the case.

Take care,

Lord_Olf

[Arnulf]

Really?  I found it in mine almost immediately:

[...] such as acts of God, war, terrorism, riots, embargoes, acts of civil or military authorities, fire, floods, accidents, strikes, or shortages of transportation facilities, fuel, energy, labor or materials.

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Clearly a case of "shortages of transportation facilities"! :D

Acts of God? Hmm. They really covered everything.

-Arnulf

[Hedon]

Yeah the latency situation is really getting annoying to say the least :angry:

It also seems to hit player randomly: e.g. we were to MC on sunday and monday and lag was atricous to me on sunday, while on monday everything was fine. Other players of the same raid group experienced it otherwise; fine on sunday, unplayable on monday. Clearly this isn't an issue of players internet conncetions, because otherwise it would be always the same people who would be affected.

What really is getting me angry is dodginess on Blizzards part: They alway try to blame lags on players connections first, before they admit as indirectly as possible that there might be a problem on the server side of things.

If their server park provider isn't able to maintain a normal latency, they should really look somewhere else for hosting.

This is a serious problem since raiding is next to impossible atm, with at least half of the raid randomly being "debuffed" by the ping of death. 30 sec or more flash heals ftw *grr*

[Roland]

I always have to chuckle to myself at the arrogance of people whenever the discussion of lag comes up. It always seems that everyone is doing the exact same thing they're cursing (insert company here) for supposedly doing. Hubris anyone?

What really is getting me angry is dodginess on Blizzards part: They alway try to blame lags on players connections first, before they admit as indirectly as possible that there might be a problem on the server side of things.

Nine times out of ten, it IS a problem on a client's end. And when that isn't the case, it can very often be somewhere inbetween a client and the server. I sometimes wonder if people even understand how a network works.

(The following is just a generalization for anyone unfamiliar with networking and network traffic. This bit is not directed at you, Hedon, not that the first paragraph truly was, either, so keep that in mind too. ;))

Think of a WHOLE bunch of interconnected highways - some big, some small, but they all end up at the same place eventually. When one clogs up, what happens? Traffic gets redirected to other areas, thus bogging them all down, too. You can see this in everyday life (for example, by me, backups on the Mass Pike can cause backlash into 495 (which in turn causes problems on Rte 9), Rte 9 (which causes problems onto Rte 30, right by my driveway, often leaving me trapped in my driveway for 15+ minutes at a time), and Rte 30, directly. Each road that gets bogged down causes overflow into other surrounding, interconnected roads because people try to find ways around the problem. This in turn causes bogging on THOSE roads, which in turn forces overflow into yet MORE roads. It's actually quite amazing to watch, even in a small town like my own, how at certain times of the day you simply cannot get ANYWHERE in a reasonable amount of time because of a traffgic jam halfway across a completely different town. Although, we DO have several major highways criss-crossing through here (including one Interstate), so I guess that has something to do with it, too. ;) I try to think about the science behind it when I'm waiting 20 minutes just to pull out of my driveway so I can have some milk with my dinner.

If their server park provider isn't able to maintain a normal latency, they should really look somewhere else for hosting.

This is what really kills me. Do you have any idea how much bandwith WoW uses? Bandwith, like all resources, is limited. Now, think just for a minute how many simultaneous players there are at any given time. Most hail in the several thousand area, maybe even ten thousand, with a SUBSCRIPTION high of maybe half a million. Blizzard broke 1.5 million in, what, their first month of release? Even one tenth of their subscription base (probably close to 2 million or more by now) would be around 150,000 people logged on at any given time! Up to 15x what any other MMO to date (that I know of) has gotten, if not more! That's a prettty staggering figure, and that's just for ONE game from ONE company! Now add up all of Blizzards OTHER titles, for which they use the same ISPs (Diablo, Diablo II, Warcraft II, Warcraft III, Starcraft). For arguments sake, we'll say they add up to around 50,000 people, combined, at any given time. You're now talking 1/5th of a million people all hammering away at their network. That consumes a TON of bandwith, and that is something only ISPs can provide. Moreover, there are probably only a few ISPs around, in any given global region, that can handle that much bandwith. Hence, their options for providers are probably not as diverse as it is for (most) consumers looking for, say, home internet. It's a LOT easier to provide bandwith for general residential consumers (downloading bandwith is, for whatever reason, infinitely easier to obtain that uploading bandwith, hence why most ISPs do not allow servers to be run in residences) than it is for a business built around online gaming.

Even all that aside, there's also the politics involved. You're probably talking multi-million dollar contracts on a yearly basis. It's not so easy to simply pull the plug on that sort of thing simply because of a few hiccups (and really, despite all the problems Europe is having, at least you can play; if it was just constant downtime, like the early days of beta, then it'd be a much easier decision, obviously). Really, how easy is it to simply switch doing business with someone whom you've done business with, major business, for over a decade? And for that matter, drafting up an entirely new contract, with a new untested business partner, takes time in and of itself, which doesn't solve the immediate problems in any way, shape, or form.

To put it bluntly, due to the extreme demands required of any ISP Blizzard chooses to use, their selection of ISPs is probably slim at best (I'd be surprised if they could find 3 or more ISPs that could serve their needs). And even if it was as simple as switching over to a new provider in as short a time as possible, it would still cause severe downtimes not only to switch over everything, but also for the DNS addresses to repopulate throughout the internet, so you're talking about a 24 - 48 hour complete downtime, minimum, which IMHO is probably far worse than simply having heavy lag during peak hours (and even during offpeak hours, since I know people are mentioning it being a constant problem).

This is a serious problem since raiding is next to impossible atm, with at least half of the raid randomly being "debuffed" by the ping of death. 30 sec or more flash heals ftw *grr*

I'm quite certain that, despite how insincere Blizzard may SEEM, they are not only WELL aware of how serious the problem is (far more than you are, I can assure you, as you are only one player; they have to deal with a few thousand of you, complaining about the same problem, and the greater overall impact of how that affects their reputation to subscribers elsewhere in the world and non-subscribers everywhere; ANY problem that causes this much player distress is a grave issue, that NO company would EVER make the mistake of trying to ignore if they valued their business at all), but ARE in fact doing everything they can to fix the problem. It's kind of hard to do anything to fix a problem that you truly have no control over whatsoever. At my job, for example, we had a period of time where customers' cars were completely undriveable for several days, simply because we did not have the proper part to fix them with (a part that takes, literally, all of 20 minutes to completely change, but a part that is vital to running the car). Was this in any way OUR fault, when the ENTIRE COUNTRY was on backorder from overseas? As in, all the dealerships across the U.S., in addition to the independents like us, and all the non-dealer parts distributors, were completely out of this much-needed part simply because of the fact that they started to have a lot of problems with them, and as such wiped out their entire national supply for about 2 weeks? We had plenty of customers pissed off at us, but there was absolutely nothing we could do about it, because we don't manufacture the parts, and we couldn't order them from anywhere because everyone was sold out. A rather ridiculous problem that causes us to start stocking said part in multiples, despite it being a very expensive item (retails for ~$450), because we couldn't afford to wait another two weeks when we were getting 3 - 4 cars each month with this same problem.

Anyway, enough chatter. :P I think I've driven my point home by now, and that is that:
a) Yes, there is a problem.
B) No, there is no simple, quick fix, or it would have been done already.
c) Yes, Blizzard is well aware of it (most likely; I'd be highly skeptical that they are really sitting on their asses about this, when it's costing them a lot in both revenue and reputation), and is doing all they can on their end, despite seeming "insincere" or "dodgy". Remember that they are probably fielding thousands of e-mails with much harsher language than you are doling out every day.
d) We've ALL been through it (the U.S. release has had plenty of problems, all-too reminiscent of the early days of Diablo II), and we know exactly how you feel, and we sympathize greatly (I know I do, at least).

Bite the bullet and just try to get through it. And if it truly bothers you that much, cancel your account for a month and simply take a breather. By then I'm sure that, not only will the problem be fixed, but it should (we all hope) be hardened against recurring in the future. I've taken several months off from all MMOs (mostly due to financial and, moreso, time constraints), and I've actually found the time away very therapeutic. I thoroughly enjoy WoW, and it was not an easy decision to simply give it up, but I'm actually glad I did. It's allowed me to not worry about "having to play" simply to get my "money's worth" out of it, since it is a pay-to-play game. It's also allowed me to spend more time doing other things in my life, without having to try and cram everything into a single, all-too-short day. My g/f will assuredly tell you that HER life has improved since I've stopped playing. ;) The dreaded word "eventually" (which is my usual response to her constant "Please come to bed (soon)?" has almost vanished from my vocabulary, which brings her no end of enjoyment. :)

Take care, and as I said, if it grates on your nerves that much, just take a break. It's really not worth the aggravation, especially since the whole point of the game (and thus playing it) is to get enjoyment out of it.

[Flymo]

We seem to be confusing latency and server performance here. The original post was about latency, i.e. the time taken for a packet of data to make a round trip from your computer to Blizzard's server and back. This is unaffected by how busy the server is and is measured by ping and the green/amber/red latency indicator.

Most of the symptoms grumbled about here - unresponsive mailboxes etc. - are because the server is busy, not because latency is high.

[Arnulf]

We seem to be confusing latency and server performance here.  The original post was about latency, i.e. the time taken for a packet of data to make a round trip from your computer to Blizzard's server and back.  This is unaffected by how busy the server is and is measured by ping and the green/amber/red latency indicator.

Most of the symptoms grumbled about here - unresponsive mailboxes etc. - are because the server is busy, not because latency is high.
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The original poster complained about the current state of connectivity in Europe which adversely affects the latency in WOW. I've experienced this too. Last monday we had a terrible, horrible MC run. Where my latency never dropped under 800 ms. It also depends a bit on luck how your IP traffic is routed. I thought I could remedy the situation a bit by forcing a disconnect on my part and reestablishing a new connection in order to get a different IP address. This made things only worse. After that my latency indicator stayed red all the time with roundtrip times of 1500 ms or greater. This continued until around 10 p.m.

The funny thing is that others in my raid group told me over TS that they had a great connection and absolutely no problems.

Nothing we can do about it until these two boneheaded companies (Level 3 & Cogent) sort it out between themselves. Blizzard in this case is without fault.

-Arnulf

[Hedon]

Newest information in "blue":

Investigations on the lag issues continue and we’re seeing progress but no definite cause and solution just yet. We’d like to point out that although there have been (and still are) peering (https://forums-en.wow-europe.com/thread....post585905) issues causing some latency throughout Europe this is not our main area of attention right now. While we continue to work with our provider and other ISPs in Europe on latency issues we’re focusing our current investigation on our own hardware and software.

We will keep you updated on the lag issues, and thank you once again for your contribution of information to help solve these problems (https://forums-en.wow-europe.com/thread....post185201).

Source: http://forums-en.wow-europe.com/thread.asp...mp=1#post603641


Ok, now tell me again, that Blizzard is not to balme for the latency issues. One has to give them credit though, that at least they start admit to it.

Since lags primarliy occur during primetime playing hours 18:00 to 22:00 I would have been really surprised if it wouldn't be a Blizzard server side issue.

[Kevin]

Newest information in "blue":
Source: http://forums-en.wow-europe.com/thread.asp...mp=1#post603641
Ok, now tell me again, that Blizzard is not to balme for the latency issues. One has to give them credit though, that at least they start admit to it.

Since lags primarliy occur during primetime playing hours 18:00 to 22:00 I would have been really surprised if it wouldn't be a Blizzard server side issue.
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OK I will.

They said they are focusing investigations on their own to stuff. That doesn't mean they will find anything. There is nothing else they can really do with the ISP's. Since the US servers did have server and local hardware lag issues I would think that they should be easily able to rule those old issues out. I know that not all servers are created equal but I would imagine that if it really was server issues that unless the US and Euro servers were vastly different that we would be having more issues over here, and we really haven't had much in the last few months. I'm not saying they still don't have a prolem, but I have friends in Europe and they have internet problems with more than just WoW.

Peak hours for the game are also peak hours for internet traffic in general. More traffic on the net is going to cause more problems with WoW. If the problem is ISP related it also makes sense that you see less lag in non peak hours.

So I'm not completely absolving Blizzard here but since there is more than just WoW affected I don't think most of the issue is their fault. I've got a feeling that the investigation of their own stuff won't really turn up much but I could be very wrong.

[Arnulf]

Since lags primarliy occur during primetime playing hours 18:00 to 22:00 I would have been really surprised if it wouldn't be a Blizzard server side issue.
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I'm sorry I cannot follow you there. I've witnessed it myself that friends had an absolutely abysmal connection whereas I had green (<150 ms) latency myself and vice versa.

This is not Blizzard's fault.

-Arnulf

[Flymo]

The confusion is because we're still mixing up latency and server performance.

The time between you doing something in WoW and seeing a result is the sum of the latency and the processing time, i.e. time taken to pass data to the server and back + time taken to process it. If you're seeing poor performance it is either because there is high latency or because the server is struggling. The way to tell which is the problem is to look at the latency bar.

So, if I have a red latency bar the problem is latency. If I have a green latency bar but get a "bid accepted" message 5 minutes after leaving the AH, the problem is the server.

Since latency is almost entirely determined by the Internet, it is outside Blizzard's control. That is why it is good for some people and bad for others. Poor server performance, which affects everyone on the server at the same time, is within their control.

It is interesting that the worst examples of poor performance - the AH and mailboxes - are ones which involve database access. It is good architectural practice to host your database and applications on different servers, but I would guess Blizzard haven't done this (because character transfers are such a big deal. If the database were separate from the servers it would not be necessary to transfer any data, just update the field containing the server name on the database record).

[Roland]

We seem to be confusing latency and server performance here.

If you were directing that at me, you are mistaken. Read my post - it is entirely about internet traffic along routes between a client and server, and has no mention whatsoever about game lag due to servers being overloaded.

Yes, the mail system and other internal gaming systems on the servers will get bogged down only if the server itself is bogged down, which indeed has nothing to do with internet traffic. I didn't raise this point, nor did I argue it. In fact, I ignored it, for the sake of clarity. :P Oh, irony, how I love you...

If you weren't directing that at me, however... Well, you technically replied to ME, so that leads me to believe you are directing the post at me. In which case I say again, I certainly wasn't confusing the issue. ;) On a side note, it still amazes me how people choose linear view over threaded view in a discussion forum. I guess it goes back to some basic way our brains function, eh? :P I need my threaded view! :D

[Quark]

It sounds to me like their investigating thier side just because that's all they can do, excluding continuously bugging Tier 1 and Tier 2 ISPs to look at thier own networks.

[Roland]

Ok, now tell me again, that Blizzard is not to balme for the latency issues. One has to give them credit though, that at least they start admit to it.

I won't. That would be ludicrous. :P They have NOW stated that they believe it to be an internal issue. Beforehand, there was NO mention of such a problem, hence why I stated that blindly attacking / faulting Blizzard without any evidence (concrete or otherwise) that it was in fact their fault, was arrogant and foolish. Blizzard, because of their constant efforts to pinpoint the problem by asking (begging, almost :P) their customers for input have found that the problem most likely lies internally with their own hardware / software, as the post you link to states. This was not the case when you originally posted.

Since lags primarliy occur during primetime playing hours 18:00 to 22:00 I would have been really surprised if it wouldn't be a Blizzard server side issue.

Ah, but yet originally you said that, while worse during peak times, it was not noticeably different during non-peak hours, such that the problem was persistent regardless of what time of day it was. This would lead one to believe it could be an ISP networking issue, or that it could be a problem internal to Blizzard, but it doesn't spell concretely one way or the other. Your statement here somewhat flies in the face of what you said before.

And yes, you do have to give credit to Blizzard for stepping up and admitting what the real problem. You also have to give them credit for petitioning their own customers for valuable data that would help them pinpoint the problem, and also for pursuing a rapid solution (even if "rapid" is not as quick as you may like). Blizzard has done remarkably well with WoW, especially in stark contrast to past internet gaming ventures. :P I think they deserve a lot of credit for what they are doing, and that even the problems they are having do not warrant picket signs and cross-burnings (not that you specifically were doing such; but you know how those public forums get...).

Once again, my best wishes to you in the hopes that Blizzard will solve this problem rapidly. We've had several of these very same instances here State-side, although I think most of them did not hit either of our main Lurker servers (Tichondrius nor Stormrage). However, I do remember very early on into release that Stormrage had some similar problems, but they only lasted a week, tops, IIRC, and thus far have no recurred.

Here's hoping to a rapid solution.