new router =less lat.

[boneshadow]

hey all. was wondering if anyone got any sugestions on ways to lower latacy . sometimes mine shoots up past 1k in wow . Currently using Lyksys g band. wireless . was lookin to upgrade to n router for better performance. Not sure if thatwill help.
open to any sugestions , if you know anything thatwill actually help. . Meh laptop typing blows. .lol

[Fear The Wrath]

ya! i was wondering the same thing! well does anyone have tips for lowering latency?

[Chorizotarian]

Using a wire should lower your latency by 20 ms or so. I also found the trick below really helpful.
Reducing latency

[aetherg]

Move to Irvine, CA

[Fear The Wrath]

well does getting a better router help with latency? and what exactly is latency?
would getting a faster internet connection help at all?

i just started my priest+4locks group last night and i had about 32ms the whole time i tried logging in this morning and now im getting 700ms+!!!

whats going on?!

also is there a way to set the affinity for the wow processes to always use all four cores that i have? everytime i log into wow i have to Ctrl+Alt+Delete and select each process of WoW and set the affinity again.. is there a way to have it already set like a default?

[Sarduci]

Think of latency as the amount of time it takes you to drive from your home to Blizzard's servers. You can pack as little or as much in your car (network packet) as you want, but it takes the same amount of time for it to go there regardless of how much is going (data). Latency would be the amount of time it takes you to drive there and back, not how much stuff you take with you. Bandwidth would be how much stuff you take with you like car vs truck vs semi. Bandwidth and latency are not tied together in any way.

You latency can change depending on how busy the server is, how busy your connection is, if you upstream connection is busy, and how busy your internet provider is. There are also hundreds of points in between which route the traffic that neither you nor Blizzard can control which can cause problems also.

[Dezeral]

A different router can affect your latency, but don't expect a night and day difference. In the EQ era, Linksys released a firmware update that totally hosed playing EQ. This was during a time when SOE was trying to secure their data stream so that application like ShowEQ wouldn't be able to intercept and decode the data transmitted to the game client. SOE's new secure data stream ended up causing certain Linksys routers to shutdown as they interpreted the EQ data stream as a type of DOS attack.

There have been other instances of routers not dealing well with constant streams of data, but I have not heard of any major issues in the last 5 years. Most of the home/SOHO routers have matured quite a lot and provide very good throughput. There are some specific routers aimed at gamers which utilize QOS metering to give priority to UDP and other types of "gaming" traffic. Even these will only provide a marginal increase in performance. The most important factor of latency is going to be your ISP.

Go visit www.dslreport.com. You can run a variety of tests through their website and see if your latency is typical for other users of your ISP in your area. This should show you if your getting typical results or if there might be a problem.

[Gallo]

Move to Irvine, CA

Post is over. Winner!

[Anozireth]

Living closer to the physical location of your realm server will often reduce latency. However if you're a US player on a US server you shouldn't be over more than about 400ms at most or something is wrong. I can play on a Boston datacenter realm (no, they aren't all in Irvine, CA) from central WA and only get about 250ms on average. Generally, the closer you live the better, but the network topology could be such that your data gets routed half way across the country and back to go to a server that is just across town.

To find out where your realm is physically located and what ones are closest to you, check this out: http://www.wowwiki.com/US_Realm_List_By_Datacenter. You can test your latency to any of the realms by pinging them from the command line. Just go to Start->Run and type in 'cmd' then at the prompt type in 'ping 123.23.52.15' (replacing the number with the IP of the server you want to check). Obviously it's not cheap to transfer a full multibox team, but it could be a consideration prior to choosing a realm.

[Eteocles]

FYI if you live on the East Coast and only had ping spikes this weekend, chances are it's not yours or blizz's fault for once; a major routing hub was experiencing major major latency issues and everyone going through it, cable or not, had a permanent 400-600+ ms latency, it was at it's worst yesterday. Wasted my sunday lvling pretty much, I ended up just playing Oblivion all day instead lol; I dunno if they fixed it yet but my tracerts no longer go through that bad hop today but I haven't been ingame yet to test