Technical Lag during combat

[rannman]

If I'm anywhere with a lot of people who aren't doing much, I have no lag whatsoever. But if I enter a battleground, especially a larger one, my latency goes from about 200 to 5,000-60,000 depending on the size. I press an AoE heal spell and then go let my dog out, come back, and it's still trying to cast it. This behavior has been consistent since I started playing on Warmane again a week ago. I tried with and without a VPN.

There no issues with any kind of ping test tools. I live near Seattle, have 1.2gbps internet, and my gaming rig is brand new (Ryzen 9 5900x, 64GB RAM, RTX 3080). My ping is typically 200-300, which isn't great but is to be expected when playing on an EU server.

It feels like some kind of client-side throttling is occurring when there's a ton of combat data, but I'm not aware of any client options I can check.

Below is some information I gathered while debugging.

Ping monitored every half-second during a battleground where I had > 5000ms latency in-game.

VPN in Frankfurt:


No VPN:


VPN in Seattle looks basically the same as no VPN.

Any ideas on what to look into next?

[rannman]

I've updated my BIOS, installed new network drivers, and turned off MSI's network monitoring software. This helped a bit, but hasn't solved it either.

[Anyone0]

Your screenshots show IP address of the logon server, not the realm you are playing on, so the results aren't really valid. You can open Resource Monitor while you are in game to see what IP address Wow.exe is connecting to.

But it seems like your screenshots show some packet loss. Your description of the problem also sounds like it could be caused by packet loss. It might be your connection to EU and might work better with a VPN located elsewhere in US not in EU. But many VPN IP addresses, especially free ones, have been banned by Warmane for breaking the rules and trying to connect from such IP address could result in your account getting banned.

[Zerrubabel]

When I lived near Seattle, I got a ping between 160 and 180 so your numbers are even high for that area. Not sure what else to say but wanted to chime in seeing where you are from and what your ping is

[rannman]

Your screenshots show IP address of the logon server, not the realm you are playing on, so the results aren't really valid. You can open Resource Manager while you are in game to see what IP address Wow.exe is connecting to.

I thought that might be the case. Thanks for showing me how to find it. I'm not great at Windows, heh.

When I lived near Seattle, I got a ping between 160 and 180

It's 163 right now, so that seems about right. I usually pay attention when it's lagging, and the WoW client does strange things to averages.

I know that many major backbones limit or entirely block ping requests, so packet loss in the middle hops are pretty normal. However, it does seem to consistently drop about half a percent of all packets. Here's more of the trace, with every hop. Graphs are just the final ones:

many VPN IP addresses, especially free ones, have been banned by Warmane for breaking the rules and trying to connect from such IP address could result in your account getting banned

Mine isn't free, but I can run tests without connecting. I'll try a bunch of different configurations and see if any help.

[Anyone0]

You can also see packet loss in Resource Monitor. I think that will show packet loss for the actual connection, which would be more accurate than using separate ping requests. Maybe packet loss for the actual connection increases when more data is getting transferred.

[rannman]

I joined an AV game since that's the best way to trigger the behavior.

Resource monitor says 0% packet loss. Ping test is holding steady around 0.3% packet loss. The latency in the ping test is consistent at 160ms as well. However, when I get near the action, it takes about 10+ seconds for spells to go off or to mount. After a minute or so of that, the client reports a latency of about 2 seconds. Ping test remains unchanged and so does packet loss :\

It feels very much like a WoW client problem.

[rannman]

I tried playing with 0 addons enabled and it had no effect.

[Anyone0]

If the game is not completely frozen and you are still able to move during that time, it's a network related issue. I would still suggest trying a VPN elsewhere in US.

[rannman]

I tried a few US locations and still get packet loss in my ping tests. But I've also discovered that MSI X570 motherboards have problems with their NICs. My networking entirely drops out for 2-5 seconds a couple times an hour. That doesn't explain the rest of the packet loss, but it does cover the big blips.

Unfortunately MSI hasn't publicly acknowledged the network dropping issue, and I've already RMA'd this motherboard once because the CPU socket didn't work. I'll try cycling through a whole bunch of drivers today to see if any other versions can fix it. This has been a nightmare of a build. :|

Once I get that fixed I'll see how bad the problem remains.

Edit: Confirmed during play time that the biggest issue is not just when my network interface claims the cable is unplugged, but also the 5-10 minutes afterwards. Even though my ping and everything else returns to normal in seconds, the server connection takes a while to be normal.

[rannman]

I haven't been able to resolve the network outages on the gaming rig, but I have found packet loss on other devices on the network when pinging the router:

--- 192.168.0.1 ping statistics ---
1138 packets transmitted, 1136 received, 0.175747% packet loss, time 1164167ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.256/0.434/8.708/0.423 ms

This issue may be related to a recent email I got from my ISP. Comcast informed me they bumped my speeds up to 1.2gbps, and my modem can only handle up to 1gbps. It could be that this change somehow affected the stability of the modem.

So I'll grab a new modem as well. Just wanted to post an update in case someone else runs into something similar in the future and they find this thread in the back pages of google.

I'm not sure why the modem would affect the router, but it's worth a shot.

[Anyone0]

This issue may be related to a recent email I got from my ISP. Comcast informed me they bumped my speeds up to 1.2gbps, and my modem can only handle up to 1gbps. It could be that this change somehow affected the stability of the modem.

That should not be related. If the maximum speeds don't match, the devices should just automatically use the slower speed and work with no issues. It might be possible that the issue is caused by your modem or router but not for that reason.

[rannman]

I tried setting up a 5ghz band on the router, then connected to that via the wifi module on my motherboard. After turning off the ethernet interface, I ran comparable packet loss tests:



So I guess it could be an issue with a cable somewhere, or the whole-house switch which feeds cat5e into each room. I'll give large battlegrounds a shot later today and report back.

[rannman]

Confirmed packet loss was the issue, and that it's an issue on my LAN. I'll work on figuring out exactly how to remedy that later, but wont be updating this thread.

If anyone runs into something similar in the future, try going here: https://packetlosstest.com/ and run on "Apex Legends" settings with a 60 second test.

WoW doesn't appear to handle packet loss well. When there are errors, it spend a lot of time trying to recover from the errors. When there's a lot of events happening, the errors pile up and will cause you to lag out. This is very different behavior from more modern games which recover a lot more gracefully.