Packet Loss During Games

Technical Support
1

I’ve been experiencing what I believe to be packet loss for many months now. I’m wondering if I can get any help resolving it. The behavior I see in game is that I sometimes rubberband slightly, and sometimes when I press an ability, it appears to cast, but then it hasn’t actually cast. Both my frame rate and latency are excellent in the display in the upper left.

I saw that I should run WinMTR to the IP: 24.105.30.129
Here are the results:

|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
|                                      WinMTR statistics                                   |
|                       Host              -   %  | Sent | Recv | Best | Avrg | Wrst | Last |
|------------------------------------------------|------|------|------|------|------|------|
|                     www.routerlogin.com -    0 |  506 |  506 |    0 |    0 |   45 |    0 |
|                             192.168.0.1 -    0 |  506 |  506 |    0 |    1 |  111 |    0 |
|                            10.56.218.21 -    0 |  506 |  506 |    6 |   11 |  157 |    8 |
|          72-31-205-112.net.bhntampa.com -    0 |  506 |  506 |    6 |   11 |  154 |   23 |
|              ten9-1.detr01-ser2.bhn.net -    0 |  506 |  506 |    6 |   12 |  157 |    8 |
|              bun103.detr01-cbr1.bhn.net -    0 |  506 |  506 |    7 |   15 |  158 |   11 |
|                             24.27.236.0 -    0 |  506 |  506 |   13 |   22 |  157 |   16 |
|                            66.109.5.225 -    0 |  506 |  506 |   12 |   20 |  154 |   28 |
|                            66.109.9.149 -    0 |  506 |  506 |   13 |   23 |  275 |   27 |
|              ae1-br01-eqch2.as57976.net -    2 |  467 |  461 |   64 |  243 | 4006 |  122 |
|                          137.221.65.132 -    1 |  492 |  490 |   64 |  105 | 2919 |   64 |
|         et-0-0-2-br01-eqla1.as57976.net -    1 |  503 |  502 |   64 |  194 |  587 |  135 |
|              be1-pe02-eqla1.as57976.net -    1 |  502 |  501 |   63 |   70 |  181 |   65 |
|        lax-eqla1-ia-bons-03.as57976.net -    0 |  506 |  506 |   64 |   71 |  180 |   77 |
|                           24.105.30.129 -    0 |  506 |  506 |   64 |   70 |  182 |   80 |
|________________________________________________|______|______|______|______|______|______|
   WinMTR v0.92 GPL V2 by Appnor MSP - Fully Managed Hosting & Cloud Provider

Thanks for any help anyone can provide!

2

You’re sending out 506 packets and those packets make it all the way to the Blizzard server, so there’s no packet loss in this test. What I do see is a delayed connection on your home equipment of 111ms before you even reach your ISP. This could be causing that issue, which can sometimes be resolved with a reboot of all networking equipment or replacement by the responsible party (you or the ISP). Also, if you’re playing on wireless, it’s highly suggested to use a cable because interference can cause high ping.

3

Well, what I can tell you is this: I play a lot of online games, and I don’t see this behavior in any game other than Blizzard games.

Overwatch tells me my latency is 44 -69 ms throughout the game, so I don’t think it actually takes 111ms to reach my IP. The 111ms you’re seeing is a worst case time, but the average was 1ms.

I am not playing on wireless, and I’ve rebooted my networking equipment numerous times over the months that I’ve had this problem.

Either way, is there anything else I can do to help resolve this?

4

44-69ms is an average, it doesn’t have a column to show you the worst occasional ping. Those “worst case times” are what can cause the behavior you’re describing. And, as the test shows, that worst ping gets higher/worse as it travels through your ISP network. It’s important to remember that WinMTR tests are read top-down, which means the first line showing an issue is where the problem is originating.

5

But that’s just one packet of 111 ping. Is that really a problem? Doesn’t it seem much more likely that the issue lies at:

ae1-br01-eqch2.as57976.net

On that line I start to see packet loss (2 packets in 500 sounds about right, doesn’t it?) and I also have a worst case latency of 4006. The sort of problem I’m seeing isn’t “my latency occasionally hits 111”. My latency is great for most of the game, except that every few seconds I’ll lose an input or rubber band.

Further, if it were a problem with my IP, wouldn’t I see this issue with non-Blizzard games?

6

As I stated before, there is no packet loss in your entire test. You sent 506 packets and 506 packets made it all the way to Blizzard. The data for the Blizzard hop at ae1-br01-eqch2.as57976.net is skewed because those hops don’t respond to all ping requests as a defense mechanism against DDoS attacks. If you were actually experiencing a ping of 4k ms, which you are not, you wouldn’t even be able to authenticate/connect to the game.

No. You take different routes to reach different services and games. One route might be laggy, while another is perfectly smooth. More info in the sticky threads at the top of this forum:

Can you take a screenshot of your netgraph in game and upload to Imgur, then post here the same way you posted the blizzard server with the ` marks?