WoW Forever: Blizzard tackles beta lag for EU testers

In the first couple of days of the WoW: Forever beta, testers in Europe ran into routing problems: trouble with the path their connection takes to the game's servers. Blizzard community manager Kaivax wrote that this affected testers' ability to move, to interact with the world and, in some cases, to stay connected. Testers replying to him describe dropouts and rubber-banding, and some say the game was unplayable.

On 21 September Kaivax said that over the previous 24 hours Blizzard's engineers had built and put in place changes that streamline routing to the beta for the EU region. Blizzard believes that fixing the parts of the problem within its control should have improved, and hopefully fixed, what some players were experiencing, and says it will keep watching the situation closely. It adds that finding and fixing performance problems is a key reason to run a public test like this one.

Ping is the time data takes to travel from a player's computer to the game's server and back, measured in milliseconds (ms). Players replying to the post give their own readings. One says their ping fell from 2000 ms to around 120 ms. Another says they had 600 to 800 ms with dropouts before, and a steady 120 ms after, with an occasional disconnect. Others report 110 to 136 ms now; the player at 136 ms says it was the same before the fix. These are players' figures, not Blizzard's. Not every report is positive: one player says the beta ran fine for them at about 100 ms before the fix, and that since the fix they are disconnected every 1 to 2 minutes.

Blizzard says some players may still have routing problems it cannot control: a connection issue at their local internet provider, traffic further along the line temporarily taking a less direct route, or firewall-type software on their own computer slowing the connection or blocking the game. The post does not say where the beta servers are. Players in the thread say the beta is hosted in North America; Blizzard's post does not confirm this. The post also says nothing about servers for the launch.