Battle.net

The term "lag" refers to the delays experienced in computer communications along a network; it's also referred to as "bad ping" or "high latency". It's generally a problem with the client/server connection caused by the response time between the two being too high.

Please bear in mind that if you have a normal latency (i.e. the in-game latency bar is green) but still experience lag in the game, this can be due to slow and choppy game play. If you are experiencing this, please check in this section.

If the lag only affects some packets of data en-route to our servers, it is called "individual lag" but if the data transmission continues and the response time increases (about 10s more), it is what we call a "characteristic lag". Lag is a word often used in the MMO game world. If you have lag server side in World of Warcraft you will notice this if you try to communicate with an NPC; it will take a few seconds before it responds to you.

Lag can have different causes:

• Internet connection problems We want to let players know that Blizzard Europe do not have any restriction that can affect a players connection. This is usually an issue with the Internet Service Provider. If this is the case, we recommend you contact your ISP.

• Insufficient computer hardware, or a low-end machine. If the textures in the game take too long to load due to quality settings, we recommend you setup the video setting at the minimum to see if this reduces the problem. After checking this, you can increase step by step the quality of the video settings.

• Customised UI mods may cause high latency, and in the case that you want to report latency issues, we recommend that you uninstall your UI.

• In highly populated zones that contains a lot of players, you may experience high latency due to the amount of data being processed. You may also experience this when in instances.

• We can encounter problems with our servers on occasion, which can create situations with high latency in the game. We are sorry for this kind of inconvenience and we try to keep you informed on our Service Status forum and by a Breaking News message on the login screen of the game.

• Internet Service Provider restrictions. Most Internet traffic is connecting on ports ranging from 1 to 1024. There are, however, ports ranging from 1 to 65535 and ports over 1024 are not standard for most traffic. World of Warcraft uses port 3724, 1119, 1120, 4000, 6112, 6113 and 6114 on the TCP protocol. Some ISPs are restricting or completely blocking traffic on ports higher than 1024, or specific port ranges. These restrictions may have different reasons, and it is important that the Internet Service Provider allows traffic on ports 3724, 1119, 1120, 4000, 6112, 6113 and 6114 for World of Warcraft to function correctly.

• During the peak internet traffic time (from 8pm - midnight), ISP restrictions can have an increased affect on players. In these cases, Blizzard Europe cannot interact personally but in order to help our customers, we create and forward a report to these ISP to let them know that a problem is being experience by their customers when playing the game due to this reason.

Reported!