MWEB Gaming Feedback

OtakuD said:
Um peering?
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The problem existed before the peering issue. And beside the peering issue would not effect WoW traffic anyway as it is international.

The MTU fix (at 960) is still doing the job for my WoW gamers. There have been instances of latency popping above 1000ms for brief periods, but on the whole latency to WoW is around 400ms. It is a mystery why the MTU thing works, but... anything for a peaceful life.
 
Yes because I always find that getting a bit of media attention helps me to relax and put the problem aside for another day :p

Please can we put our conspiracy hats back in the sock drawer, I don't like losing customers and I'm not going anywhere until this is fixed.

To answer your question Piet yes we have tried several things in the last couple of days. In between dealing with the fallout of yesterday and todays link failures and occassionally paying attention to my other varied duties I have been in constant contact with our networks team assisting in providing additional captures and feedback and testing changes, so please accept my apologies for the lack of posts.

I did not ask for customer feedback on any of the changes as I do not want to create any premature expectation of a fix until we actually think we have one and we now have 3 internal resources, including myself, providing traffic captures and feedback under controlled conditions. As soon as we feel that we have made some significant progress I will ask for some general feedback on your experiences.

Which brings me to my next point...

I am currently on Dunemaul in Dalaran, with latency hovering between 600-700ms. I have been logged in since 17h50 during which time I have moved around between Dalaran, Stormwind and IronForge. I have seen it spike up to 1200 once and hover around the 900 mark for a bit, but it seems to be staying down fairly well on the whole. My MTU is set at 1492, I have the TCP No ACKDelay fixes in place and no other client side tweaks or tunnels.

So... I'm very interested to hear what the general feedback is on the experience tonight?

Thanks
Will
 
Will@MWEB said:
Actually I think we may be overlooking the obvious here. It's possible the pingtest server he is connecting to is on a network we are not peering with.
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Please provide a list of companies with which you are peering and which you are not.
 
Ok i just did some testing. I'm on twilight's hammer (most popular SA wow server). Logged into Dalaran with 10 000ms. After a few minutes it dropped to 2000, left Dalaran and went to kill some mobs in Grizzly Hills. Its now on 1500ms.
Its such a weird kind of lag we are dealing with, Its like you get 10 seconds of lag free play, then the next 10 seconds are totally delayed. To elaborate, I will cast a few spells totally lag free, then suddenly everything stops responding and a few seconds later all those actions will go off at once. Needless to say this renders the game pretty much unplayable at any real level. Is this what they mean by packet loss? Normally with lag, if you have 1500ms, you will cast a spell and 1.5seconds later the spell with be cast. Not with this, it comes in waves.
Don't know if this helps at all. I'm trying to be as helpful as possible :)

UPDATE:
Ok I dont know much about how all this works but it seems like this to me:
Its like the line can only handle a certain amount of information. if you are just chilling the latency is fine, you can mount up with normal latency, open you bags etc. As soon as you do something that sends a lot of information, like fighting, join a group etc, it sends a large amount of server requests and reaches a threshold that cuts you off.
That's the best I can explain it with my limited knowledge.

Thnx.
 
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Sorry Lounger I'm not at liberty to divulge that from a contractual point of view I've been told that the peering arrangements often have non-disclosure agreements attached, but these things are easy enough to work out with some tracerts. Right now the main ones I can tell you that we are not peering with are Telkom and MTN Business. I checked the source of those pingtest servers and there seems to be something not 100% with that test as the values returned are not in line with command line tests performed on the same line, but I haven't had a chance to dig too deeply into the matter as I have been focusing on the WoW issues at present.
 
So I was talking in trade and noticed that some of my messages didn't go through at all, almost as if the server didn't pick up my messages. Also, I tried doing a bg but every now and then players would "hang" and run in place for like one second and then continue onwards
 
Thanks Vaughan, mine has also climbed to unplayable levels again. Also checking on Lightbringer and it's much worse there than on Dunemaul so there is some variance from Realm to Realm.
 
As i said earlier I have a few friends who are on the same Mweb account, same Telkom line, and same WoW server. They have had perfect latency this whole time, which is a really odd. I'm sure there are many others playing WoW on Mweb who are also fine or this forum would be a lot longer.
Maybe we are lagging not to the server we are playing on, but to the server where our characters are stored. This would perhaps explain the intermittent nature of the lag.
How do tunneling services work? Would it not be possible for Mweb to emulate this kind of thing for their gaming clients? it certainly would put you a step above the competition :P
Will try get my non-lagging freinds to log now and do some testing.
Thanks again Will.

LoL UPDATE AGAIN:
I do remember when my friend last came around to my place he tried logging here and had the same lag i have, so that kind throws that theory out the window.
I live in the Cape Town CBD, he lives in Tokai, Southern Suburbs.
 
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:D
Oh hai guys :)
Im Vaughan42's mate I can in fact vouch for the weird latency.
I live in Tokai Cape Town and my average latency on Mweb Uncapped on a 4mb line is 300 - 500ms at most. its been really great of late.
Few weekends ago I was rocking it bro style at Vaughan's flat (Watching HD stream of Blizzcon) as Wow geeks do. I was so pumped by the flood of win that we where imbibing that I fired up wow.
I was met with the sharpest and most relentless lag spikes I've ever seen. Huge rubber banding and intermittent bursts of normality.

So how can I help guinea pig to help out some fellow Wow bro's :)
 
Hi Will, I am on the server Twilight's Hammer and have a 300ms ping WITH WTFast, just entered a BG 290MS, will try later without proxy service (usually play with one as i pvp), live in Durbanville btw CT


Edit:
seems without the proxy its on 600-800

BG's are fine thus other pvp should (technically) be fine, but we can only test BG's as arena has ended
 
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Done some testing to, on Sunstrider were when i log in its giving me round 400 ms but when i move or try to kill stuff it spikes and i cant move at all - ms sits at 3-4k. Did the same on Dragonblight and its abit better but ends in the same way and both servers were medim with players on the server. Must say thats its nice to see Will is trying to help out so thats a big /applaud from my side and i must say when my line runs well it realy does so ill give it sometime and hope it works again soon. hint 7th :)
 
Well i dont know if this helps but when patch 4.0.1 was live i had the same think happing as it is now and thats was for round 2 weeks and from then its been realy good with the ms, so my lag is back from the patch 4.0.3 and if it the way it looks then next week is going to be bad then with 4.0.3a going live next week. If someone may have some info on this please let us know.
 
XGosupanda said:
:D
Oh hai guys :)
Im Vaughan42's mate I can in fact vouch for the weird latency.
I live in Tokai Cape Town and my average latency on Mweb Uncapped on a 4mb line is 300 - 500ms at most. its been really great of late.
Few weekends ago I was rocking it bro style at Vaughan's flat (Watching HD stream of Blizzcon) as Wow geeks do. I was so pumped by the flood of win that we where imbibing that I fired up wow.
I was met with the sharpest and most relentless lag spikes I've ever seen. Huge rubber banding and intermittent bursts of normality.

So how can I help guinea pig to help out some fellow Wow bro's :)
Click to expand...

Thanks Mr Panda, you are a very interesting specimen indeed :D Please could you do two things for me:

Grab hold of an application called Wireshark (www.wireshark.org) and try and capture some traffic of your WoW play. Ideally you need to close down all other applications so that we get a clean grab and start the capture before you launch WoW. If possible could you create at least 2 - 3 captures each of around 5 minutes in length.

The second thing you can do for me is to send me a PM with your MWEB username and a means for me to contact you, either email, or telephonic. I need this firstly as we would also need to look at what's happening on the traffic manager and secondly as I will need to make contact with you to arrange getting the capture files from you.

If you're having trouble getting going with wireshark just send me the contact details and I'll walk you through it over the phone.

Thanks
Will

EDIT: I'm also interested to hear that you guys watched the Blizzcon stream on an MWEB line. What was the experience like?
 
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I still can't do anything in WoW. Though I haven't really noticed since I haven't played much recently, I plan to play much more in the coming months. So I'll be leaving Mweb for the second and last time. Good luck to you who are trying to fix the problem.
 
Hey guys Ive just had too sit out yet another raid becuz im sitting with Latency frm 3k - 19kms... i thought this **** was sorted :<
anyway just wanted too add my totally useless comment :)
 
Hi Llewelyn from dragonblight :) My lag has gone for 30 mins and counting - 350 ms and no spikes, ill keep you guys updated. shammys rock!!
 
I have also been experiencing the same kind of spiky game play, i do not currently play live WoW servers ( BETA FTW ^^ ) and for the last month and a half i couldn't even log in, but since middle last week-ish my lat has gone from 22k + to a range of 700-1200 ( the server is full as hell so i never got anything under 500 anyway).

The same kind of this is happening is BFBC2, i would have like 100 latency, but the game play is spiky as hell, and even when its not spiky its like a micro lag that im getting. I would fire of and entire clip and not have a single hit. I know that the last patch has some hit-box issues, but no bug can avoid 12 shot gun shells to the face at point black range.

I'm am also noticing an unstable connection on the normal web browsing side. one page would pop up in an instant, and then i would refresh it and it would take AGES to load, and when its finally done, half of pictures (Deviant art) and ads (the crappy flash rubbish) would not be loaded.

Another thing i also see happening is that my downloads would just get time outs and stop.( not torrents. things like updates, speedtest.net's download test etc.) so i'm suspecting that there might be some sort of communication mismatch between mweb and who ever on the other side of the seacom cable is.
 
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