Why is my college internet running games slow, but the actual internet really fast?
Asked by
EnzoX24 (
1991
)
August 19th, 2008
Today is my first day of college and i just got internet set up on my comp through a direct connection. I tested it out online and it loads websites and movies faster than my internet back home. But for games its slow as anything.
My friends and I bought World of Warcraft as a way to stay in touch over the next few years, and back at home it ran great. But for some reason, even on this faster connection, the game is soooo slow. It is not even worth playing. Is something set up on the network that is interfering with my game?
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7 Answers
Maybe you need a better graphics card?
Why would that bother me now? The game ran fine no less than 12 hours ago. Plus I’m using a MacBook that is 3 months old.
If you’re living in residence then you’re likely using your college’s connection. It could be that your college is throttling connections to the warcraft servers or has some sort of packet prioritization scheme going on.
Warcraft is a very good way to avoid completing a degree (or so I’m told) so it wouldn’t surprise me if some schools have measures like this.
To be clear, are you getting slow framerates or high latencies?
Slow framerates have everything to do with your machine. I would try to run fewer programs while running WOW, especially if you are using a high-ish resolution.
high resolutions are the debble!
If your macbook is as new as you say it is, then you shouldn’t have too much of a problem, though.
High latencies are all about your connection to the Blizzard servers. The problem can be in more places. College dorm internet access is flooded with traffic. Twelve hours ago may have had completely different traffic, causing a different connection for you.
paulc may be right, too. Where the school does not find academic merit in the game, they may have a system in place to de-prioritize the packets from the game.
Macbooks are portable; so if I were you, I would take a field trip to an area on campus that doesn’t have a terrible amount of people already crowding up the school routers. This may be a good test of the kind of connection that you are getting based on measures the school may be taking.
You may also try creating a character on another server: note latencies with this server. This will test Blizzard’s end.
Google up World of Warcraft port forwarding. If you are unable to get port forwarding set up at school, then you’re screwed and may have to resort to attending class and studying.
Sorry to answer an old question, but I would imagine that the reason it’s slow is because college campuses normally tend to do whats called traffic shaping where they make programs like WoW or UT or Torrents very slow so it doesn’t slow up the rest of the network. So really the only thing you can do is go to a wifi hotspot or something of that nature to get a better connection.
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