Healing in 3.3: Busting Lag

First note: This is the first review of a product that we’ve done at www.theholypaladin.com. We don’t believe posting reviews on bad products…. If you’re anything like me you’ve seen the adverts around the place for services claiming to reduce your lag. They do this by increasing your response time by lowering your latency. Lowering your latency has a massive direct improvement to your healing performance. I’ve tried a few services and haven’t been impressed, but came across one that both works and is so simple to use…

They all use a technique called SSH tunneling. While I read up on what it is, my eyes glazed over about encrypted this and that forwarding ports, firewalls, forwarding and lots more. I’m not a network engineer and I’m sure most of you aren’t either. Lucky for us, we don’t need to know how it works, we just have to trust that it does work. For those who want to read more on the technology go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunneling_protocol.

Lets first look at a little history. It wasn’t too long ago that these latency-lowering services were offering their services for as low as $1 a month. This is no longer the case. I would hazard a guess that they realize that the service does have value to their customers and they need to have a decent setup for the performance to be worth the expense.

To be honest, I tried the $1 services and they were more bother than benefit. The servers were often too crowded to gain any benefit and the technical requirements of the user meant you had to put in more effort than most raiders were willing to put in.

To best utilize these services, you need some technical knowledge about how internet traffic is routed or needed to spend a chunk of your time testing which ssh server was best to use.

It all sounds a little daunting doesn’t it? Well not anymore. Along comes a new ssh tunneling service called WTFast. What’s best is it works and it makes it simple and only costs $6 a month and works out of the box without needing any configuration at all.

If you trust me enough to simply accept what I’m saying and want to improve your latency and your performance click here to get the WTFast software and service.

Ok, lets look at WTFast. From their website:

WTFast.com - Our claim:
- Improve your response time up to a full second or more
- Stop lagging in high population areas and raids
- No more missed clicks, missed opportunities
- Dramatically improve your PvP performance
- No more disconnects!

Made by hardcore gamers, for hardcore gamers. We have the best technology, the best talent, and the best connection available. We streamline your data to the game servers so you can PWN the enemy before they can say WTFast!?!?!

How does it work?
Simply put, we streamline your game data to the game servers. We ensure that your game data uses the fastest and most reliable path to get to the game server, greatly improving your responsiveness in the game. In real-world terms, when you normally play the game, your data is often going down slow sidestreets and alleyways when you play. With WTFast, your data is on a fast freeway with no speed limits - right to the game server! The majority of users who try WTFast do see a noticeable improvement, it is free to try.

What is latency and response time:
Latency is the time it takes for data to get from your computer to the game server. This is usually measured in milliseconds (ms), there are 1000 milliseconds in one second. The response time is the time it takes for data and the corresponding event to get to the game server and then back to your computer. The response time is generally about 2x the latency. This means that if you are improving your latency by 250ms, you are improving your game response time by about half a second. If you improve your latency by 500ms, you are improving your game response time by a full second. This makes a huge difference, especially in "fast twitch" situations where you need to interrupt a spell, deliver a killing blow, get off a heal, attack someone before they hide around a pillar, etc, etc, etc. You can see your game latency real-time by hovering your mouse over the little computer icon while you play WOW. (See picture to right)

All interesting stuff isn’t it? Yes I know the name, WTFast is a bit of a silly name, but who really cares? All that matters is what it does for us right?

What blew me away by this service is the ease of use of this service. Every other service that lowers your ping that I’ve seen requires you to choose the best server, which also requires you to have an idea on what you’re doing to maximize your performance. With WTFast.com this is all done for you. Just log in, click which server you’re playing on and their software handles it all. It works for both US and EU Warcraft accounts. That means it works on all World of Warcraft accounts. It also works for other games: Aion, Startrek and Eve Online.

Something to be aware of, you’ll still get the occasional lag spikes… I found that you might get them more than you were previously getting without WTFast. Then again I also found that the lag spikes were only spiking up to what the latency used to be before I had this service. It’s still a significant improvement. I think over a 4 hour period I felt maybe 3 spikes.

The net effect: My latency dropped from 450-500 to 190-210.

So does all this reduction on latency actually improve your healing performance? Without a doubt, the answer is yes.

For me, the latency improved my response time by 400ms, which is just under half a second. While it doesn’t sound like much, it really does make a difference.

The feel of it is also less cumbersome. The great majority of you play from USA so you don’t feel the issues that come with 400ms+ latency. To put it into words… It just feels smoother and more responsive.

Even doing all my in-game mail and auction house stuff goes faster. When I shift-click on my mail, I’m getting stuff out twice as fast. I’m actually surprised at this benefit.


Little Hiccup:
I did however find an issue. I wanted to test to see what the performance changes would be on another computer I have here. Since your license it to work on one computer at a time there is a procedure to move it to another computer…. My issue? It didn’t work. It was supposed to send an email that just didn’t arrive. After I reset it to work on the second machine, it also stopped working on my main machine too. Yes, there are multiple computers here. Most households have this, right?

Now it’s obvious that you’re not supposed to have multiple people using the same account (this service won’t let you do this anyway unless you purchase multiple licenses) at the same time. It’s good to know that if you have multiple people using the same computer, you can use one account. This is great for social players in the same household that play at different times. If you play at the same time on multiple computers, you’re going to need to buy WTFast multiple times so you all gain the benefit.


Customer Service:
On the Internet customer service is where it’s at. Very rarely do you find personal interaction when things go wrong for an item that only costs $6. I had a problem, so I emailed their customer service…. and the owner helped me with it. Even though I don’t think we worked out what the issue was, in short time we worked out a fix to the situation, so all was good in the end.

It’s a sign of a good business. Not everything is going to work perfectly for everyone. You have to understand there are so many different computer configurations out there something is bound to not work perfectly. It’s when things don’t work that you get to find out what a business is really like and how they treat their customers. WTFast gets top points for this!

I also found that the owner is very open, up front, honest and friendly to boot. You just don’t see this enough these days in online businesses. It’s refreshing to see.


Who will benefit most from this service?
The higher your latency, the more you’re going to benefit from this service. This doesn’t mean that you’re not going to gain any benefit if you live in an area with relatively low latency. Every bit counts!

PVP players are going to gain a huge benefit from this. Even if you have low latency already, it will be worth using the trial to see if it will help reduce your latency even that little bit more.

I come from an area where it seems to be best suited. I have an average latency greater than 400. It almost halved my latency.


But what about in raids?
I agree, there’s no real point in only testing while spamming trade chat or crafting a few so first I ran an ICC10 pug.

The latency stayed low throughout. I believe my position on the healing meters was better than it should have been without the decrease in latency.

Then I took it into ICC25 for The Blood Queen. This encounter has previously been hell on my computer in the past. Lag spikes up the [insert your favorite word here], getting DBM warnings late etc. etc. Using WTFast all this cleared up. We even had one person experiencing significant issues (severe lagging and disconnects) using a competing ssh tunneling service. In my WTFast has passed the stress test. I’ll still be paying close attention to its performance.


It’s not a magic cure all pill.
Lowering your ping won’t automatically transfer you into a highly skillful player. It just doesn’t work that way. It will help you by lowering your latency thus increasing your potential reaction time. The trick to improving your performance is to take advantage of this improvement and work on your skills and reaction speed.

It also won’t fix major issues your ISP is having. The best fix if you’re having ISP issues is to change to anther ISP.


Biggest problem I found:
I found that I was running out of mana faster. Lower latency allowed me to cast more healing spells, putting further pressure on my never ending mana pool.


Lets look at it. Do they live up to their promise?

1) Improve your response time up to a full second or more
Yes, without a doubt.

2) Stop lagging in high population areas and raids
You betcha. Without WTFast when I bubble-hearth to Dalaran it would lag to no end for the first 20 or so seconds. With this service, I don’t suffer this anymore.

3) No more missed clicks, missed opportunities
Either I misunderstand this but this seems to have more to do with the coordination of the player. If it means in PVP (or even PVE) that you don’t miss getting that spell off due to lag, then yes, they deliver.

4) Dramatically improve your PvP performance
I cannot speak for this since I don’t PVP. Perhaps that was due to my latency, but I can see significant improvements to PVP with reducing your latency.

5) No more disconnects!
I can say that I experienced ZERO disconnects while using this service.

Yes, they deliver what they promise.

Conclusion:
I highly recommend you get WTFast if you want to improve your healing performance. I’m a convert and now use their service and suggest that you do too.

When you’re ready to sign up and want to improve your latency and your performance click here to get the WTFast software and service.

I’m sure you all have other questions. I have done my best to be thorough so send feedback and I will do my best to answer these questions as they come in and update this article.

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