Random latency spikes

East coast US.

Just resubbed to give BFA another go, immediate regret. Every 5-20 minutes, there’s a 2-5 second delay between the client and the server. It’s lag spikes. It’s also not on my end, I ran a constant tracert and there were no issues yet the game started spiking multiple times during the test. Sometimes I see world and home latency spike to 150-300. My line is not experiencing packet loss and my latency is perfectly fine for every single other thing I do online. I’ve seen this problem before many times since WoW launched and it was a problem with the old AT&T backbone network. I’m using Spectrum/TWC. Anyone else having problems?

Hey Førte,

There were some issues in the east coast with Spectrum a week or two ago, and you may want to try flushing the DNS.

Also, if you have just come back to playing WoW, it’s possible that there are old files leftover that aren’t compatible with the new updates. I’d suggest clearing out the old files and testing the default client by doing a UI reset if you haven’t already.

If you have Killer hardware / software, this can also cause issues due to the changes with the file structure. You can try the steps listed here if you do have Killer stuff.

Otherwise, let’s get a WinMTR test so we can see what may be happening. To do this, download WinMTR and type 24.105.62.129 in the “Host” field. Click start, then play for about 20 minutes after you get issues, then click on “Copy text to clipboard” and paste the results here.

Gonna go ahead and say that I normally flush my DNS and always delete directories when I uninstall games.

I ran MTR for a bit and this is the result.

|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| WinMTR statistics |

Host - % Sent Recv Best Avrg Wrst Last
First Node - 1 366 364 0 0 1 0
cpe-XXXXX.carolina.res.rr com - 1 366 364 4 11 52 11
174.111.72.252 - 1 366 364 11 75 554 27
cpe-024-074-248-032.carolina.res.rr com - 1 366 364 9 12 21 13
ge-5-1-0.rlghncpop-rtr1.southeast.rr com - 1 366 364 14 20 29 20
66.109.10.176 - 1 366 364 21 27 35 24
66.109.5.117 - 1 366 364 20 29 93 21
66.109.9.155 - 1 366 364 20 24 63 22
ae1-br01-eqdc2.as57976 net - 1 366 364 73 79 160 77
et-0-0-2-br01-eqch2.as57976 net - 4 321 309 70 130 2894 77
137.221.65.132 - 2 355 351 73 103 2858 75
et-0-0-31-pe01-swlv10.as57976 net - 1 366 364 70 76 88 76
137.221.105.2 - 1 366 364 72 76 95 75
________________________________________________ ______ ______ ______ ______ ______ ______

There is some packet loss across the board, this is normal for my area and that low, low amount never caused too many issues before… but look at

et-0-0-2-br01-eqch2.as57976 net - 4 321 309 70 130 2894 77
137.221.65.132 - 2 355 351 73 103 2858 75

Those numbers are GOING to cause problems, especially eqch2.as57976 net which has 4 % dropped. I ran this test for about 10 minutes. 4% on that node then 2% on the following over that short time frame indicates an issue on that network which is way off my TWC network.

You may see those hops have increased latency or packet loss, but this is typically due to DDoS mitigation on those servers. Since the next hops do not have lost packets, the data being sent to the actual WoW servers does not appear to be dropped. They only drop when sent directly to as57976 which is to be expected.

By the time your connection reaches the WoW server, the average latency is 76ms with spikes to 95ms.

Since many other people also go through the same as57976 hop and there doesn’t appear to be widespread issues, there may be other problems affecting your connection specifically. My guess is that there may be some kind of throttling happening near your home network. If you have an alternate network you could test, such as a mobile hotspot, that would let you compare the difference with your home network.

It’s not my network. It’s those two nodes. There shouldn’t need to be any more proof for that case than what I provided. WoW wouldn’t be the only game/service I use with problems if it were my network.

edit: I just had another lag spike and during it, I hit start on MTR. This happened to that node:

| et-0-0-2-br01-eqch2.as57976 net - 24 | 13 | 10 | 0 | 632 | 4804 | 82

It completely stopped responding for a good 10 seconds.

edit Just going to stop responding? What the hell kind of support is that?