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Hi all,

I'm going to be starting a new character soon and I am curious if there would be a performance benefit to choosing servers in my timezone. I am located on the US West coast (PST) and I see that all the new servers are CST. Would I get a better connection to the realms located in the PST zone vs ones in CST (if they are similar in population)?

I guess the bottom line question is - Where are the realms actually located in the US, and does choosing one in a specific timezone help reduce latency.

thanks,

Jeff

I wish the answer was simple but it's not, the main source of latency and lag in WoW is actually their servers and network response rather than raw ping time to their location. As for the location the PST ones are in California and the new CST ones in Texas (haven't checked the latest but...) so usually you would have less latency to California but that may differ depending on your ISP's connection to the AT&T trunks.

Cool,

I'm trying to decide between Dragonblight and Runetotem. Runetotem is brand new, and Dragonblight looks like it has a decent ration of alliance v. horde. I'm rolling my first Horde character.

Any suggestions between those 2 server? When I first installed the game, blizzard recommended Runetotem as the first server I should join.

Jeff

I live in the east coast, and when I first started playing WoW I was on Skullcrusher, which is also an east coast realm and had a very high population and still does. My latency was below 100 all the time. I switched over to Silvermoon, a west coast realm, and my latency jumped up to well past 100 as the lowest, average is about 200. Its common to see your latency bar turn the golden color as well.

But latency is only one part, the actual servers at times lags. And being a Mage, lag kills.... Your latency will be fine but just that you will notice the delay between casts and it gets annoying at times. Luckily it doesn't happen often, but when it does you'll know and you'll curse Blizzard for it. But this happened on both Skullcrusher and Silvermoon.

Overall I didn't notice anything different between a west coast realm and an east coast realm. AT&T is doing well with their connections to Blizzards servers, you can do a traceroute and see what path your connection takes to get to the realms and how many hops and the latency as well.

What are the IP addresses of the servers? I'd like to do a traceroute.

Jeff

for a traceroute, you use: tracert us.logon.worldofwarcraft.com > C:\tracert.txt


http://www.blizzard.com/support/wow/?id=aww0827p5

When your playing WoW:
Start, run, cmd
Type: netstat
Look for the IP ending with :3724
This is the port that Blizzard uses and the IP is that of the realm you are on.
You can then proceed to do tracert <ip> and just watch as it comes back with all your connections. You will eventually reach the point where its not returning anything but * * *, thats Blizzards firewall system in place and thats the farthest you will get.