A number of East Coast based customers of World of Warcraft have been experiencing connection delays and uncomfortable lag – and no one seems to know exactly where the problem is.
The New York Post says that Blizzard is blaming Time Warner Cable is for the problem:
“The only commonality between all the players experiencing these disconnects and extreme latency is Time Warner/Road Runner,” the company said in a June 23 support post.
But the Digital Communications Director for Time Warner has said that the lags and disconnections are not on their end and points to the traceroutes as evidence.
Take a look at some of the traceroutes posted to the thread in question … starting here, at comment #446: http://tinyurl.com/5gqe27
If you follow the commenter’s posted trace results, you’ll notice that it’s only on TWC’s Roadrunner (rr) network for the first 6 hops — with maximum response times of 10 ms. The response time jumps drastically at hop # 11 — when the trace is no longer on the Roadrunner network.
Scroll down further on the same page to comment #456, and you’ll see something similar — a giant leap in lag times. However, this trace never touches our network. It starts at Verizon, goes to Alter.net at hop #5, and then jumps to ATT.net’s network at hop #8. Hop #9 shows a response time of 114 ms — quite a jump from the 49ms at hop #8.
So, what’s going on?
One of the theories is that Time Warner is lying and is throttling World of Warcraft traffic, considering all the bad blood between savvy broadband users and major ISPs over BitTorrent throttling. And while I can’t prove that they’re not doing so, I have to admit that the theory doesn’t seem very likely because of the nature of World of Warcraft.
See, MMORPGs care more about latency than bandwidth. While patch downloads can be huge, the majority of the content of WoW requires low latency to provide instant responses to actions. Latency, in WoW can result in an annoyingly choppy game, and a multi-hundred millisecond delay may be the difference between slain dragon or hobbit pâté.
So from a bandwidth-saving perspective, a ISP wouldn’t have a whole lot of motive in blocking World of Warcraft or other MMORPGs.
Additionally, Comcast, Time Warner, and other cable companies were rumored to use BitTorrent throttling because both legal and copyright infringed video files competed with the standard television cable offerings of those companies. This also doesn’t seem to be the case – as while more generally, time spent playing WoW is time not spent watching TV, it’s not a specific competition. Indeed, MMORPGs are one of the key drivers for broadband speeds in the U.S., and I have trouble believing that TW or any other company would knowingly interfere with such a cash cow.
Indeed, I believe that TW might be reaching out to users to find out more about the problem because TW might be interested in solving the problem instead of losing customers to other ISPs like Verizon FIOS.
Of course, I don’t know anything – and I wish that I had some inside information to figure out what was going on and solve the problem. Not only would I look like a genius but every one of my friends who plays World of Warcraft would hoist me on their shoulders, and treat me like a Lich King for a Day. Sadly, I think that it’s going to take Blizzard and TWC together to try to triangulate why this problem is happening.
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