Are they blocking it or something?
I am from Australia and I either use Mudfish and Exit Lag, mostly Mudfish to reduce lag…
For some reason, looking at settings and such, Blizzard is the only company that I still have the worst ping.
For example, the only way for me to get into ARAM fast is in north american server, Australia, Singapore and best match, I am always waiting over 300 seconds and AI joins… it’s only NA that I can get into a game.
I disabled Mudfish and my ping for NA around 300 went down to 250 which is the opposite of what should happen.
Anyone else using similar programs to try reduce ping?
To be honest, routing traffic through one of those ‘services’ is just one extra hop the packets have to travel through.
I never used such programs as an aussie player.
It is an unfortunate fact of life that ping from Australia to Europe or US servers will always stay high due to laws of physics (massive distance).
But as you may know, that ping hit is worth it for playing on a server with 50x more players. Sadly.
(Mudfish works, you just need choose the correct server for it to work through trial and error. But because a single Mudfish server has so many users, many of them are blacklisted and won’t let you connect. Tons of people use it for abusive purposes like ban evasion or harassing companies and individuals, like ordinary VPN’s.)
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The reason you feel the ping so much with HotS is because HotS has no lag compensation. Games like Diablo IV or other MOBA products like HoN or LoL all have client side lag compensation which can help mask such higher latencies.
The situation is made worse due to HotS’s decline in popularity. It might not be possible to get a match quickly in low population servers, forcing the player onto more remote servers.
Most services promising less latency are “snake oil”. The main contributor to latency is physical distance, since communication signals travel at a speed based on the speed of light, which is a very finite and well defined speed. For example, getting lower than 100 ms from central EU to west coast US is likely physically impossible due to the physical distances involved.
The only times these services might improve latency are the following…
- The service’s network has significantly fewer hops to the destination than the ISP’s negotiated route. This reduces delay caused by packet routing.
- The service’s network uses less congested hops. this reduces delay caused by packet loss/retransmit or packets being stuck in buffers.
- The service’s network has access to physically more direct route. The ISP’s negotiated route might involve indirectly routing by other countries that diverge from the shortest path, while the service might pay for bandwidth on a premium route directly between countries.
I suspect for Australian players it is mostly the final point which allows such services to have any sort of measurable improvement. The services likely pay a premium for bandwidth in direct undersea cables that are too expensive for local ISPs to use. It is also likely why there can be regression as in the case of HotS the service has a less direct route to the HotS server you are trying to play on than the negotiated route from your ISP.
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