smoothping

[diablito]

someone suggested smootping.com to solve my lag issues in raid. Has anybody tried this before? does it work?

my problem is not an addon, graphics, or regional issue. It's a time warner issue.

[Slashbubblehearth]

Time Warner supposedly has some kind of data problems atm and you will lag, hard. It's been going on for like two weeks now and they haven't found a solution yet. =/

[ayako]

There is http://www.lowerping.com/ as well.

[Twilightdawn]

I think he was asking if its safe or not.. the website that is

[daphoosa]

I have no experience with Smoothping, but I'm skeptical that adding another stop between you and your server is going to truly going to make your connection better. At the end of the day, TW is still delivering it to your door.

If they have a free trial offer it might be worth trying out.

[Maoli]

We've been having the same issue as TW users up here in Canada. I'm in Nova Scotia on Eastlink and any servers in the Chicago data center are lagged during peak hours. Can log into east coast/west coast data center hosted servers just fine. I'd be interested to see what others think of these services too.

[ocuus]

Just FYI all of the websites listed above and there services are against Blizzards TOS.

[Shinshiva]

Just FYI all of the websites listed above and there services are against Blizzards TOS.

i love how you edited it and gave the reason "grammar".

Also: you can't be banned for "opening up a direct route to a server" (disclaimer: not really what happens but meh) from your computer. blizzard can't track what you do on your side, they can track what programs you use IN GAME and if they give you an unfair advantage (note that better MS is not deemed an advantage) they will take action

[kylerium]

Daph is on the right track here. Do not use these type of programs. Most of them are clever bits of spyware that while they may not be directly destructive to your pc, are still providing some type of data back to the company. They actually do give the illusion of lower latency but its all just the program manipulating the number itself w/o actually doing anything. As was stated before, Time Warner has a known issue right now on their system that they're working on. Until thats fixed or you switch ISP's, I'm afraid you're gonna have to stay in the same sinking ship as the rest of us. Hope that helps.

[ayako]

Daph is on the right track here. Do not use these type of programs. Most of them are clever bits of spyware that while they may not be directly destructive to your pc, are still providing some type of data back to the company. They actually do give the illusion of lower latency but its all just the program manipulating the number itself w/o actually doing anything. As was stated before, Time Warner has a known issue right now on their system that they're working on. Until thats fixed or you switch ISP's, I'm afraid you're gonna have to stay in the same sinking ship as the rest of us. Hope that helps.

You are pretty ignorant, if you knew anything about these they use programs that they don't develop in house, many of which are open source. You could use these services with a self compiled putty client, and a proxification program / driver of some sort. (Speaking about LowerPing, SmoothPing does have their own client, which does essentially what you can do with the above)

[sjkhay]

It works great. I had ~210 latency in-game steadily, and I'd spike up to around 500-650 during midday. I've got Time Warner, just like the thread starter. Using SmoothPing Elite, I get around 90 in-game now. For me, the service works great. I'm still on my first month of free Elite, but I love it.

For the people worried about account security...I felt the same way at first. SmoothPing offers it's own client if you subscribe to the service, but you can also subscribe to the service and use several freeware programs to use the service that aren't affiliated with SmoothPing in any way. There's guides to setting up all the freeware programs right on the SP website. I understand that doesn't solve the issue entirely, since the data is still going to SP's servers, but 85000 people have signed up for the service and haven't had trouble with hacked accounts. I don't have an authenticator on my account, and it's been about two weeks now using SP without any trouble at all.

I guess to sum up this wall of crap...If you're thinking about trying SmoothPing, give it a shot because it's well worth the 6 dollars a month. I went from 210, spiking to 500, down to 90. Haven't had any trouble with my account, and the Elite client is highly recommended. Automatically chooses the best server for you, one click to start it. The only configuring you have to do is choosing where your "wow.exe" file is located.

Edit-
Read this and bookmarked it so I could reply to it. Didn't realize how long it'd been, my bad for the necro. It's done so oh well.

[hellboyy]

these tunneling services may work fine when you are out on the world questing etc. they have never worked for me in raids, they just cant handle the large amount of data during boss fights and just get overwhelmed and disconnect.

[Alfador]

I have no experience with Smoothping, but I'm skeptical that adding another stop between you and your server is going to truly going to make your connection better. At the end of the day, TW is still delivering it to your door.

If they have a free trial offer it might be worth trying out.

Look at it this way. You mail a letter. The Postal service carries it all the way from your house, to a post office, puts it on a big truck, sends it to a facility that processes mail from hundreds of post offices, and can't handle all that volume, so like 4 days later your letter finally leaves. on a big truck goes to another center like that across the country, same issue. Then it finally gets sent to the local post office at the destination and goes out. That's Time Warner right now. These tunelling programs don't really add an extra stop. If you do a traceroute on a wow server you notice a lot of stops anyway on all sorts of switches across the web to get to the destination.

Imagine t hat with this tunneling service, instead of addressing the letter across country, you address it to an express courier local to you. Instead of going to the distribution center, it goes to the post office and immediately out to the courier, who then flies across the country with it, drops if off at the local post office at the destination, and it goes out to the recepient within a day. Essentially the post office (time warner) excels at end point delivery and pickup, but has crap for a distribution network, while the courier (tunneling service) has no origin and destination pickup but is much better at the distribution side of things.

It's a crude analogy but it's basically accurate. What is far less important than the number of stops is the efficiency of those stops at taking your data and moving it along without delay.

And no, nothing about this is against the ToS. It's basically just a proxy server, and there is no rule banning those. That could change but as of right now, it's not.

[sjkhay]

There is one warning I'll give to anyone thinking of using any of these tunneling services.

They do change the IP that you access the servers from, so it may trip Blizzard's automated system. Your account doesn't receive a temporary ban, but it does get locked out until you change your password. As soon as you change your password, your account unlocks. Can be annoying, but it's only happened to me once so far and I imagine an email to CS would take care of any human-action on my account (72hr ban due to suspicious activity) since CS/GMs review the automated system's actions.

[philefluxx]

someone suggested smootping.com to solve my lag issues in raid. Has anybody tried this before? does it work?

my problem is not an addon, graphics, or regional issue. It's a time warner issue.

Not sure your implied level of technical expertise warrants that avatar.


Just saying....

[Racerover]

Smoothping user for over a year now. I'm on the west coast on an east coast server and it helps substantially. It's very affordable as well.

[misanthropes]

Alternatively, you could try leatrix latency fix. It doesn't work the same way as smooth ping, does something about regulating incomming/outgoing packets from your comp (I won't pretend to really understand). You can find it at wowinterface.com, they give a lengthy explanation of how it operates. It dropped my latency from about 200ms to a solid 60ms. Most people I've recommended it to absolutely love it and I've used it for years with no problems.

[silverhope]

I have been having huge lantency due to timewarner so i tried smoothping and OMG love it. only problem i had was crashes with putty but all i had to do was download putty and change the port to 44. and all is golden now. Im never above 90ms even in raids and bgs.

[vicarious ink]

Leatrix Latency Fix (LLF from now on) disables the handshake associated with TCP/IP. Please only use this if you have an already fast internet connection that doesn't blip out. This can create issues, as with editing all stuff from Registry, the LLF will create a restore for the Registry if you decide later that it was not worth it. The program is really simple and you can either:

Install - Install will remove the TCP/IP Handshake and allow your traffic to almost run seamless.
Remove - This will put the TCP/IP Handshake back into the system after you reboot.
Check - This will see if you already have it installed.

It's fairly simple to use if you do not want to pay the fees for SmoothPing. Personally, I have done both have no issues with either one. With the LFF, I went from 120ms to 40ms. I am also located near my server over here on the West Coast.

If you have any questions about it, let me know.

[Alfador]

Leatrix is only good if your bandwith is good but your ping is a little slow. i.e. you can download/upload fast but you run wow at say 200ms, it might get you down to maybe 100ms.
I run wow with the leatrix fix on my PC and it keeps me around 67ms, in MA communicating with a Dallas datacenter realm.

However, and this is very important, if your ISP is having data carriage issues, which the time warner issue is, leatrix will probably make it worse.