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