So…I live in Canada if that matters. Been playing WoW for 20 years, mainly over wifi, and as of late, the game “pauses” for 2-3 seconds, then acts like it’s fast forwarding for those 2-3 seconds. My latency on Classic SoD Wild Growth is usually around 70ms, as the server is on the west coast. This is whether it’s wired or wifi. The only difference is I never lag with wired. Wifi I have to reboot few times an hour, as the latency eventually peaks around 350ms. Even when it “pauses” often my latency is actually at 70ms. No other game does this. Guild Wars 2, Elder Scrolls Online, Final Fantasy Online, Call of Duty, Destiny 2, etc. I’m fairly good with PC’s but am at a loss here.
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If wired is fine, but wifi has issues, then the problem is definitely somewhere between your computer and your access point/router. All games handle network traffic differently, and some are more sensitive to connectivity/packet issues than others.
Could be the wireless driver on your computer, your wifi card getting flaky, your access point/router getting flaky, could be RF interference [cell phones, microwave, radio… literally anything that receives information over the airwaves) disrupting the connection between your computer and access point, just to hit the most likely culprits.
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Yeah, it’s just so odd that after all these years, literally being in the same spot, and not moving anything around that could interfere with the signal, that I now I have issues. And that no other game gives me this. I did read before, a rumor that suggested World of Warcraft is more sensitive to wifi network. I’ll just use wired. It was more about not understanding why it happened out of nowhere.
As to this, neighbors adding a new wifi spot, etc. can all add to the issues with wireless signals.
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You’re describing packet loss and it can come from a ton of different things.
High CPU load can cause the wifi to get unstable, which can cause high packet loss and that will increase your ping. WoW is a CPU bound game and your drivers are also bound to that CPU as well. Even if WoW doesn’t look like it’s using that much CPU in the resource monitor, it’s far more complicated than that when it comes to system timings for other resources.
I’ve personally seen and had this happen with other games, even so far as to actually cause the wifi card to completely drop connection to the router. I actually had it happen the other day working with a UE5 project during shader compilation. Had something downloading in the background that got paused because of it and I sat there twiddling my thumbs for an extra 30 min waiting for it to finish, because I failed to realize I didn’t resume it after the connection reset lol…
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The list of things that cause problems with wireless connectivity is quite literally a mile long, if not longer.
A very short list of the more common causes of things that can cause issues with wireless connectivity that used to be fine, and suddenly isn’t, without you doing anything to change the environment at all could be a couple of the ones I mentioned already. Sudden driver issue for your wireless card or degradation of your wireless card and/or router. Other possibilities could be something like a new cell tower going up in your area. Components in your microwave getting weird and creating a lot of extra noise (usually pretty to troubleshoot - problem occurs only when microwave is running).
Zungar mentions another very common culprit - your neighbors. If you had new neighbors move in, they’ll almost certainly have a wireless access point/router, and it could now be interfering with yours. If your neighbor got a new access point/router. It’s pretty easy to have your access point/router on the same, or an overlapping, channel as your neighbor.
There’s certainly a convenience factor to wireless networks, but for reliability and speed, it’ll never hold a candle to a wired connection.
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Windows sometimes periodically updates your network drivers I think, so that could also cause it if they made some changes in a newer driver version. Sometimes they have to sacrifice performance to mitigate some potential security exploit(anyone remember the spectre/meltdown CPU exploits and how much performance was lost with the microcode fix? some CPUs lost like 30% of their benchmarks)
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Yeah PC’s can be quite intricate, and not always easy to figure out. I’ve just gone back to a wired connection, and have 0 issues now. My OCD is having a hard time adjusting. “But why all of a sudden? But we must find the reason why.” LOL
Oh I feel you on that lol… How old is the router and how old is the NIC in your PC?
Without going on too long of an engineering rant, components can wear down over time. Electrolytic capacitors are usually to blame in a lot of cases, since they are filled with fluids/gels that can break down over time. That breakdown can mess with circuit timings/voltages for things like the tank circuits that control the frequency regulation and that also power the antennae.
Picture listening to some analog FM radio station like 100.0. If you drop it down or raise it up to 99.9 or 100.1, you might still be able to hear the station, but will get some static from time to time and sometimes you’ll get cross talk between stations. Your router can have similar issues if the wifi signal frequency isn’t snapping to the exact channel frequency that it should(losing tolerance ranges basically), or if it’s not doing so with enough power. This can lead into interference problems if you have a lot of neighbors and it can also lead to aggressive channel hopping.
Long story short, it sounds like the signal to noise ratio (SNR) is too low(you want it to be as high as possible) and it’s affecting the quality of your connection. It can be caused by a lot of potential things like new routers going up in an apartment building, old/failing hardware components, bad grounding on components(front port USB3.0 ports in PCs are TERRIBLY notorious for this), along with a ton of other things.
Personally, the last time I had a similar issue, it was a bad ground in my PC that came from the USB3.0 ports on the top of my PC. But I had to whip out my oscilloscope to find and verify the problem. Had I not found it there, I was about to buy some wifi analyzing hardware to scan around around the house scanning like some ghost hunter 
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LOL. My PC is 2 months old, and I have the latest modem that exists by my ISP. It’s about 6 months old or so. What is odd though, is the fact that my wifi works flawlessly with every other online game I’ve tested. Then again, I understand WoW is a bit different in how it handles networking.
Then it might be caused by some new routers popping up in the neighborhood clogging up the channels. There’s no real way to avoid that problem unless you want to coat all the walls between your router and PC with tinfoil(an extremely good “mirror” for 2.4/5ghz signals). WoW has a pretty high packet rate and has to send quite a bit of information with them. While WoW’s tick rate isn’t as high as say playing on 64 or 128 tick counterstrike servers, I’d take an educated guess and say it’s more demanding since counterstrike isn’t really sending that much data per packet(just some basic location/rotation vectors mostly).
I know from this upstairs PC, I can see routers that I know are hundreds of feet away(neighbors we know), but we also live on a street that’s slightly elevated from the surrounding areas, so there’s less to block the signals.
Other than that, if WoW is putting too much load on your CPU, that can also affect signal strength, but isn’t as common of an issue these days with most CPUs having more than 4-6 cores now.
It might also be a case of the connection having troubles holding some channel width like 80mhz and having to drop to 40 or 20. Most routers use multiband connections like a/n/ac mixed for 5ghz and b/g/n mixed for 2.4ghz, so sometimes it will mess around with the parameters to find the most stable combination of things.
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