During the second half of 2010, MWEB users playing World of WarCraft were experiencing high latency and were struggling to get an adequate gaming experience. This is evidenced by an extensive thread on the MyBroadband forums which were started to address the issue of high latency in MMOs as well as other general MWEB gaming problems.
MyGaming caught up with Nathier Kasu, head of MWEB Digital, to discuss the problems that were plaguing MMO gamers and how MWEB worked to resolve the issues.
Kasu began by explaining that the latency problems experienced by individuals were due to a number of unrelated issues. In order to address problems, MWEB relies on customers feedback so that they can begin to investigate. In the time before MWEB’s Cape Town IPC node was launched, connectivity between users and the Johannesburg IPC node is usually the first area investigated.
Kasu explained that a number of factors such as traffic routing, ADSL data throughput, ADSL exchanges and the quality of the backhaul links connecting the gamer to the IPC node could influence gaming quality.
Kasu said that MWEB steadily isolated problem hotspots and worked with Telkom to optimise data traffic routes, with particular attention paid to 4MB ADSL line users. “Some significant changes were made at a network (software and hardware) level,” said Kasu.
MWEB’s recent introduction of an IPC node in Cape Town went a long way to alleviating problems for a number of users. “The Cape Town IPC was a big milestone for us, moving aggregation points closer to customers. The more IPC nodes we can get close to our customers, the better the level of service we can offer,” said Kasu.
This new IPC node means that the data round-trip for users located near Cape Town is significantly reduced, as it does not have to travel to and from the IPC node in Johannesburg. “Since launching the IPC node in Cape Town, complaints have died down,” said Kasu.
“Johannesburg-based players are also having a much better experience, so we believe the Cape Town IP and SAT3/SAFE capacity played a big part, but was by no means the only factor in getting this issue resolved,” said Kasu.
“Unfortunately we don’t have any local World of WarCraft servers,” he continued. This means gamers have to break out onto the wider internet to reach an international WoW server. This adds another layer to the potential problems “as we do not have full control of the route to the final destination server,” said Kasu. MWEB’s international data traffic will be carried by either SAT-3/SAFE or SEACOM and a number of networking issues could crop up between the MWEB IPC nodes and a WoW server on the other side of the planet.
“Having a local server on one’s own network is the only way to manage the end-to-end experience,” explained Kasu. However, MWEB worked hard to optimise the way in which traffic was landed with MMO and WoW servers, saying that upstream traffic was proving problematic.
“It’s interesting to note the problem seemed to concentrate around WoW, and other internationally hosted online games were not affected in the same way. There are also other ISP’s (e.g. Virgin in the UK) which reported similar problems to those experienced by our users,” said Kasu.
On the WoW side, Kasu said that Blizzard appears to have made some changes which have also improved player latency.
In some cases, seasonality played a role, in that when more players were cramming into a WoW server, the experience was degraded. Large content updates and patches also played a role in causing problems.
MWEB is now reporting that apart from isolated cases, MMO gaming in general and World of WarCraft in particular has been restored to a playable state on their network. “I’d say it’s more than just playable. Online gaming is probably at its best since we launched our own ADSL network,” Kasu concludes.
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