So I’m currently living on the west coast. When playing on a West Coast server I get 10ms(home) 30ms(world). When playing on an East Coast server I get 50ms(home) 55ms(world).
Couple questions:
What’s more important, home or world latency?
Does server prioritize you with players from the same servers for latency reasons?
Will a 40ms difference be felt in game? (I’ve read in PvP this would be essentially doubled since there’s a back and forth interaction of spells with players?)
Friends want to role on a East Coast server for population reasons, but I’m worried about the latency issues.
I can only speak from what I see personally. Both on my laptop and wired connection, I get around 80 ms on both connecting from the east coast to a west coast server.
Home is really just your computer to your router. (I’m amazed at yours!) 30ms is also really good. I find things start to get really noticeable if you get to 3 digits.
So your numbers shouldn’t be a problem at all. What really comes into play is graphics. I find that those with graphics cards that struggle, big battles (lots of actions, lots of people say, going against a boss) really lags out a computer.
Latency is surprisingly non-intuitive. Back when I lived on the east coast, my latency on an EST server (Bleeding Hollow) was consistently above 90ms, when I lived in Tokyo was around 120-160ms, and now in PNW is around 55ms (similar to you). Only thing I can figure is that where I lived out east had some spectacularly bad internet infrastructure to make latency 75% as bad as connecting from literally the opposite side of the globe, lol.
I can definitely feel the difference compared to playing on a west coast server, but once you adjust to it you kind of forget about it. When it’s higher that’s a lot harder to do - when I was in Tokyo playing on 120ms+ for example things like cast animations not lining up with actual cast times started to become readily visible.
Not sure about server/shard prioritization. I’ve ended up with oceanic players in battlegrounds a few times and it drives latency up to the point that it feels like the server is out on the moon or something.
A lot of the East Coast is old infrastructure, which is one of the challenges one has to live with. You also have to be wary of companies (Verizon) promising great speeds. I’ve talked with their techs and what you find out from those guys is that it’s all old copper in our area and really can’t support the promises without major upgrades $$$.
It also depends on the route your computer connected on. Sometimes I see a latency in the 200+ range. When I see that, I quit wow, close battlenet and restart it all. If that doesn’t work, reboot the PC entirely to establish a new connection and route.
Your connection to the server isn’t a straight line. It requires “hops” or other routers/gateways that your connection has to connect to and then it continues on with being routed to the destination. You could be in NY and connecting to a server in Florida and have a worse latency or ping time compared to someone in Arizona simply because one of those hops is unstable.
There is a heck of a lot more to internet traffic routing than what meets the eye when determining latency.
If you want a live example of this then open command prompt and run tracert command followed by the IP address or name of a website. It will show you each hop required to go from your computer to the destination.
Yeah that lines up, where I lived before there was coax and phone lines that hadn’t been replaced in many decades. Speeds capped at like 20Mbps for $80+/mo. It’s a wonder I had a consistently ok connection at all.
By contrast, out here in PNW I have fiber to the house gigabit that actually performs as advertised for $60/mo. Kinda crazy how different it is.
I have never seen numbers that low, mine hangs around 70~80 world and the game play fine. When it gets over 100 is when the problems start, for me anyway.
Network Latency is an indication of how fast data packets make it back and forth.
All it takes is one othe routers in between your PC and a Blizzard datacenter acting up or an ISP of Blizzard’s getting a DDoS attack and things can go to hell quickly.
Honestly, anything under 150ms is decent. You really won’t notice anything odd.
When latency starts to hit 250+ ms is when you may notice things, like NPCs/players could start to look like they are teleporting.
At 300+ ms you may even start seeing ability cast delays and other things. At this point to me the game playability starts to annoy me and I will generally log out and try to figure out the problem (usually Router or the ISP having issues most of the time).
Mind you these are just my observations that I have personally witness and not always the same for everyone else it is just what I have experienced. I do have a background in IT work.
The faster data packets make it back and forth the smoother the game plays.
Lastly, I am not sure what Blizzard refers to for Home Latency ( I would guess this is the latency to the datacenter where the servers reside) and World is the latency to the actual server for the Realm you play on. That is my guess.
As for lagging out the computer issue in big fights, that is due to WoW’s engine not taking advantage of graphics cards resources more. Remember the engine is getting pretty old now, even they they do updates here and there, but I am guessing the core stuff is still fairly old.
And it could be this is my (bad) perception of it but I do not believe so, I can monitor my computers resources and my graphic card usuage never goes very high.