My fiance and I play World of Warcraft, and for the last several weeks, we've experienced some very frustrating game lag come and go from day to day. I started using the PingPlotter trial to try to figure out where the problem lay, and when it ran out, I purchased the Standard Edition.

Our suspicion has always been our ISP, Comcast. We've been in touch with them many times, and I even have the number for our area's maintenance supervisor (nice guy, but not as responsive as I'd like). I've read many of the Pingman articles on how to interpret the graphs, but I remain confused about something.

In the attached image, I focused on a spot where we experienced severe lag. The last hop is our actual realm server IP (determined from my Windows 7 Resource Monitor for Wow-64.exe). The previous 4 hops are clean, there's a couple 8.3% PL, 4 is clean, then 2 and 3 show the exact same amount of packet loss.

I realize I may not be looking at this data in the right way, and I know you're supposed to only worry about the final hop then work backwards. But, the matching PL percentages stand out as being related. No?

Hey Mark,

Thanks for getting in touch - and thank you for your recent PingPlotter Standard purchase! We appreciate the support.

It's tough to draw any correlation to the packet loss percentages at hops #2 and #3 and your final destination. You're focused in on a *very* small period of time here (12 samples, from what I can see), and 2 lost samples in that period can account for a 16.7% packet loss reading (so it'd be easy to get some misleading patterns with this small amount of data). The fact that the packet loss isn't present at hop #4 (or hops #7-10) would typically imply that it isn't playing a role in your issue. It's difficult to say for certain without being able to see the timeline graphs for your intermediate hops, though.

If you'd like, feel free to send over a .pp2 file of your results (you can post them here, or email us at support@pingman.com), and we'd be happy to take a closer look and offer any guidance we can!

In the meantime, your goal here should be to correlate the issues you're experiencing while playing WoW with any patterns you can identify in your PingPlotter results. You're off to a great start by tracing to your server IP - and you should try to keep a trace running to this target for as long as possible (24/7, if you can - so you can capture any/everything that happens). When you experience lag in game, you can make a note of it in PingPlotter (more details on how to do this here: http://www.pingplotter.com/manual/time_line_graphing.html), so you can see if any "problem" patterns are present in your PingPlotter results when you're actually running into problems with your connection. We cover this practice in quite a bit more detail here:

http://www.pingman.com/kb/47

Your next goal should be to eliminate any variables (that you have control over) to see if you can isolate what the culprit in your issue is. We've got a great article that provides some tactics and best practices on this front:

https://www.pingman.com/network-nirvana/

Hopefully this helps get you headed in the right direction! If you should find yourself with any other questions - please let us know.

Best wishes,

-Gary

Sorry about the slow reply. Our Internet has actually been pretty decent since I originally posted, so it seems like Comcast may have finally cleared something up on their side. If the issue returns, I'll supply the .pp2 files, as requested.

Thanks!