Disclaimer: This is something I've posted on my guild forums and we've had some success using the techinique posted below. The script isn't my work although it replicates a registry key I figured out myself.

I'm sure a bunch of people will comment on how it's extremely unsafe to run .vbs files you've downloaded from the internet. I agree totally. The script is provided for those people who don't feel comfortable editing the registry themselves.

To give an example of the kind of improvement I've seen. When playing around last night during peak time I was getting a ping of 250 when normally it would be around 400-500.

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Okay thanks to the internode and lowerping stuff and random people around in the warcraft community. We now know that blizz has screwed up their netcode and this means people with high latency suffer more than they should.

For those who know their networking basically blizz follows nagle's algorithm(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagle%27s_algorithm) but don't understand the consequences for players with higher latencies. They could easily allieviate some of our latency issues by opening our connection with tcp_nodelay enabled.

Luckily for us we can disable "Nagle's algorithm" on our computers in windows by setting a simple registry key.

1. Open the registry editor by going start->run and typing "regedit" then pressing enter
2. Nagivate to "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\Interfaces\"
3. Look in each of the keys inside that one (they look like: {random numbers and letters]) and determine which one is your network connection. You can tell this since it will have your computers local ip address stored in it.
4. Add a new key called "TcpAckFrequency" of type REG_DWORD and set the value to 1.
4b. If you are using windows 2000 call this new key "TcpDelAckTicks" and set it to 0 instead.
5. Restart your computer.

You should now see an improvement of perhaps 100-200ms.

If at some stage you wish to remove the key just go in there and delete it.

To make it even more braindead some smart people out there came up with this script: http://files.racs.com.au/_WOW/SetAckTick.vbs

I've looked at it and all it does it set some keys in your registry. No harm will come from running it. If you happen to use applications that send out alot of small packets of data though this will negatively impact performance. But since most of you probably play wow, download "movies", and music you'll be fine.. If you do alot of telnetting then you might need to disable the registry "fixes" if you're concerned about performance.

-------- TLDR VERSION -----------
Run this: http://files.racs.com.au/_WOW/SetAckTick.vbs
Restart computer
Load wow
Enjoy lower pings

For vista you'll need to download this patch http://thehotfixshare.net/board/index.php?showtopic=3265
It is a microsoft patch but its a beta release for the upcoming sp1.

For XP you shouldn't need to download anything provided you've kept your system up to date.

If you have any questions please feel free to respond here. You can ask me in game but please check I'm not raiding when you do. You'll likely be ignored :P

hmm, so lowerping and co entails your connection to the wow servers just going via some computer with those settings enabled or something?

i assume they won't stack?

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Q u o t e:
hmm, so lowerping and co entails your connection to the wow servers just going via some computer with those settings enabled or something?

i assume they won't stack?

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As best we know lowerping enables tcp_nodelay but also appears to route your connection faster than normal.

I don't know for certain if they stack but my understanding of lowerping is that they wouldn't. However there is some question regarding lowerping's "legality" with the WoW ToS. You can goto lowerping.com and a quick browse of their forums leads to several cases where people have been banned apparently for using lowerping.

I would hazard a guess that using the internode service is significantly safer since it your ip address will not change significantly.

I can vouch for the fact that Kat.................................. Is the guild key logger.

How do you think we progress so far, if we get stuck, we just key log better players accounts and use their toons to do the dirty work for us...


In other news... Taking on Mother last night with a green latency bar ftw O.o

AFAIK Lower Ping creates an SSH tunnel for your wow traffic..

SSH traffic has a higher priority than gaming traffic on routers so has a transit time.

The "lowerping.com" thing is to have you tunnel your connection using SSH. SSH disables Nagle Algorithm since it expects you to be doing interactive stuff, like typing into a console and whatnot.

That is to say, "lowerping.com" create a dummy account that will let you SSH tunnel into their box (the open source OpenSSH server does the hard work and forwards your WoW connection on to the correct server using the SOCKS protocol), they just useradd you to a machine hosted close to your battlegroup's server farm and collect their $15AUS, or whatever they charge, pretty scummy of them to do that instead of publicising the information Katryna is forwarding on.

Thanks for posting the Vista patch Katryna, I couldn't find that anywhere :-(

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Q u o t e:
SSH traffic has a higher priority than gaming traffic on routers so has a transit time.

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Well I suppose they could setsockopt IP_TOS to IPTOS_LOWDELAY but I refuse to check :P

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Q u o t e:
AFAIK Lower Ping creates an SSH tunnel for your wow traffic..

SSH traffic has a higher priority than gaming traffic on routers so has a transit time.

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Source please? I've never heard this claim before and find it a little hard to believe. QOS is a CPU intensive process and ISP's generally try to avoid implementing unless its easy to differentiate which data has higher priority.

Experience in the industry. been a while but I know where we worked we often had SSH prioritised or something. QoS is done quite a lot over in NZ, mainly shaping p2p traffic, which is basically anything that doesn't run over the normal protocols.

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Q u o t e:
oh god


green latency
edit: oh, at least I'm still spiking like @!!%, so it's ok

edit nr2: oh ok, 1600 latency, I guess nothing changed.

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1600 latency tends to indicate that there is something wrong with your connection.. or your isp. It also can indicate that there is something wrong internationally but if that were the case we'd all be experiencing it.

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Q u o t e:
Experience in the industry. been a while but I know where we worked we often had SSH prioritised or something. QoS is done quite a lot over in NZ, mainly shaping p2p traffic, which is basically anything that doesn't run over the normal protocols.

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Shaping p2p traffic is something I know happens. It just that generally SSH isn't something you'd normally want to give a higher priority to since it isn't latency sensitive. It might be possible that in a network that does alot of financial connections you might want to prioritise it but thats about the only case I can tihnk of.

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Q u o t e:
What's wrong with my connection is that it's wireless, I think ... it should be put down, but then I wouldn't have a connection at all anymore =/
I'm deleting my post from before, because this actually helps! It's just the lovable lag spikes that I always have which are just as present as always.

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Yeah.. i used to play on wireless and it can be very bursty.. That's the nature of wireless though and if it can't be helped then you're stuck with it :(

Just did it then. Dropped from a steady 500 to 200-300. Thank you muchly :D

Very Nice.. I have sandboxed it in a VM with Vista and it does what it says..

However, for the x64 users of Vista, you will need this link.

http://thehotfixshare.net/board/index.php?showtopic=5976&hl=KB935458

However, I have not had a chance to test it out in a raid situation to see if there is any noticeable improvement.. that will have to wait for tomorrow

Thank you and good find.

~Bob



edit: need to learn to link the right thing

This one worked for me last night, brought my latency down from 1000-1100 down to 500-700ms. there's a post about it somewhere in the Tech Support forums but I can't be arsed looking for it.

Go into Device Manager and open up the settings for your network card, in the advanced options look for references to TCP, IP and/or UDP checksum offload and make sure they are set to 'Disabled'. This may only work on NVidia boards and on Vista systems (thats what I'm running so I can't speak for other board/OS combos).

Blizzard are now banning people for using lower ping, as it makes it look like a gold service or some garbage =(