For the past two weeks Oui and I have been experiencing higher than usual latency in WoW making the game practically unplayable and in a moment of weakness we tried out Smoothping. While it did seem to stabilise our latency it didn’t provide anywhere near the benefit advertised and most importantly it didn’t give us latency similar to what we had before our problems started. It did provide some benefit when soloing or during 5-mans, but everything else was impossible.

Talking to our ISP is bad enough, but communicating with Blizzard via email is an exercise in frustration because they suffer from what I like to call email lag. Email lag is the inability to send more than one email a day, so when you send them anything you want to give them as much information as possible to cut down on wasted time. Of course they don’t work weekends either.

Friday night I’d logged off after send my alt some money to watch the first three episodes of Torchwood: Children of Earth (which was awesome), followed by the final two the next morning, so when I logged on in the afternoon I was surprised to find I wasn’t where I’d logged off. I thought perhaps Oui had logged me on after I went to bed, but he hadn’t, so I logged on again to find that I was again not in the same place I’d been the previous logon. My heart was racing and I quickly opened the account management page (which seemed to take forever) and changed my password because it was obvious that my account had been accessed by someone other than me.

I’ll save you the long story of what followed and just say that everything is in the process of being restored but I am now extremely paranoid about how they got in. That is, how did they find out my password and what else do they know. I’ve thought about it and come to the conclusion that it was either a Flash trojan, or Smoothping as I run nothing else. Obviously I don’t want smoothping anymore (especially as its benefits seem to have disappeared). My system has been reformatted back to Vista and two authenticators are making their way to us, much to Oui’s chagrin.

These two things have made us question if we really want to play WoW anymore. Latency frustrations are not fun and while it’s no fault of WoW (I think) Oui is completely uninterested in playing while the problems persist. Having my account compromised has made me extremely paranoid and it’s a shame that this feeling all stems from a game that is supposed to be fun. Worse is the knowledge that in the past when I’ve heard of other peope in situations such as the one I’m in right now I’ve always considered them to be a right idiot, so that must make me an idiot too.

Oui was talking with me tonight that he would post on the forums to tell everyone he’s taking a break because of the latency, so how ironic was it that I logged on and everything was back to normal. No latency problems whatsoever (well, the latency was back to ‘normal’). He’s sceptical that it will still be bad tomorrow so I’ll check in the morning, but we’re riding the thin edge of quitting here.