# High Latency with WoW



## bpatters69 (Mar 21, 2006)

Hello folks. 

This is my first post. Thanks in advance to any responses

I have been playing WoW since last July and I have not had too many problems with latency, however; in the past two to three weeks the latency has been so bad that I cannot play the game. For those of you who play the game, you know there is a status bar which is green for good latency and red for bad latency. The symptoms are always the same. I start off with latency below 200 and over about 10 to 20 minutes the latency climbs until it is well into the thousands, ie 3,000, 4,000, etc. It has gone as high as 9000 and then disconnected. I called Tech support last night and they gave me some pointers. My latency hit an all time high of 16,000!

I can't be positive but it seems like when I go into battlegrounds or I am in an instance with several other players it tends to get worse. I can shut the game down and wait 5 or 10 minutes and then start it back up with the same result. I have tried WoW technical support and they told me to update my video and sound card drivers. Yawn. 

The specs on the PC that I am using are: 

P4 3Ghz with over 1GB of Ram 
64MB ATI Radeon 9000 Video Card 
Windows XP 
Dell Notebook 
McAfee Firewall 
Netfear Router with firewall 

I have opened all the ports on both the Netgear via port forwarding and also on the McAfee firewall. I have set the pc up in a DMZ so that I bypass the Netgear router. I also have the PC set up with a static IP so that the Netgear knows what IP address to forward ports to. I have updated all of the drivers per WoW tech support. I tried disabling the McAfee firewall and just using the Netgear hardware firewall. Regardless of what I have tried, I get the exact same result. 

Last night I decided to run a speed test shortly after I logged off of WoW to see what my bandwidth was. The speed test registered me at less than dial up. I am using DSL which is supposedly 1.5 x 256 best effort. I know WoW does not need that much bandwidth and this is more of a response time issue but the test made me wonder if a rogue application was running in the background. I checked ctr-alt-del but I did not see any processes that looked unusual. I did see that WoW causes the PC to run at 100% but that is normal from past experience. 

I also have WoW on a different computer with the following spec: 

P4 1.3 gHz with 768Kb of Ram 
128MB Video Card (Can't remember model NVIDIA maybe) 
Windows XP 
Dell Desktop 
McAfee Firewall 
Netgear Router 

The game seems to run decently on the above PC. The latency stays below 300 which is still green. One difference between the two set-ups is the notebook has a newer version of McAfee. Another point of interest is that I did not configure the Netgear router to port forward to the desktop and it still worked ok. 

After all the fussing with the notebook, I am now fairly convinced that there is some kind of rogue application running in the background that I can't identify. It might even be Blizzard running their Warden program which helps stop cheaters. My questions are: 

1. Do you agree with my assessment? 
2. How do I identify the rogue application? 
3. How do I get rid of the appliaction? 
4. Are there any "safe" programs which can tell me if I am connecting to other pcs or if any pcs are connecting to me behind the scenes? 
5. What else could it be? 

Many thanks for any advice, Bill


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## Fieldweeble (Mar 23, 2006)

I can't really help you with your problem, but I use WinPatrol to determine what services, startup programs and tasks are running, and which ones I need to kill. Might help you in your situation if you find things you don't recognize.

http://www.winpatrol.com/

Free download, pretty handy.


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## bpatters69 (Mar 21, 2006)

Fieldweeble said:


> I can't really help you with your problem, but I use WinPatrol to determine what services, startup programs and tasks are running, and which ones I need to kill. Might help you in your situation if you find things you don't recognize.
> 
> http://www.winpatrol.com/
> 
> Free download, pretty handy.


Thanks.... I hate to ask but do you know if Winpatrol is a safe program? No Spyware, etc.


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## Fieldweeble (Mar 23, 2006)

I've been using it for about a month now, and haven't noticed anything. Appears to be clean -- doubt anyone would pay the guy for the full version if his free version had spyware. No gaurantees though


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## bpatters69 (Mar 21, 2006)

*WinPatrol*

Cool. Thanks for the update. Winpatrol should help me out. 

Would Winpatrol help with diagnosing spyware? I kind of understand how Spyware works. Does Spyware connect to a remote server? If so, WinPatrol would pick it up. Right?


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## bpatters69 (Mar 21, 2006)

Just an update. I did a horough and I mean thorough spyware/malware/virus check of the machine and it is now clean as a whistle (Thanks to the guide on this site). I did not find any viruses but there was some spyware which I have removed. WoW does seem to run better but I still get the high latency but the latency is not as bad (still red though) and does get better after a few minutes. I am no IT expert but my guess is the spyware was causing problems but I now think the WoW servers are overloaded and or not matained correctly. 

I have heard rumors that Blizzard, aka WoW signed up a bunch of new players lately and their servers cannot keep up. Shocking..... not


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## bpatters69 (Mar 21, 2006)

Just an update......

I went into McAfee Firewall and removed all rules for the game. McAfee sets up a rule every time an application accesses the Internet and it also allows you to open ports which are specific to a game.

I logged on to the game and I experienced the same latency problem which lasted for about 15 minutes or so and then...... Nirvanna! No problems with latency, no frame rate problems. The game ran very smoothly.

I log on the next night and back to the same old problems. Bad frame rates and high latency which make the game impossible to play. I don't get it. I did not do anything different form one night to the next. I did run a tracert on both nights and the info was no different. The second line of the report does show a "*" in the second (4th column) line which I am told means that I am dropping packets.

Sigh.


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## DoomKnight (Mar 27, 2006)

Hey, i think i can help u..
i had this kind of problem as well and i fix it.
try to scan ur PC from virus ans spywares. believe me its spys... i req u to scan with "Spyware Doctor" i found on my PC 60 spys and after remove them my ping was so low then ever be4 so try that.

let me know pls if it had work for u.


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