Guys, could anything be done to improve pings from Europe? It annoys me as hell seeing constant warps in my sights when I'm on close 6 of the boogie.
Actually the ping time itself doesn't cause warping. Everything under 300ms should be playable, if it's stable. You can't do much to improve your ping, since it's mainly dependent on the distance from your location to the server. The only solution would be to move to Texas for best ping times!
As said, stability is the key word when talking about warping. As you might have heard in the news, there's been severe storms both in the USA and in Europe. They have damaged Internet connections here and there, so there's nothing you could do unless you are a network technician doing the repairs.
What you
can do is to make sure your own activity isn't causing warping. Warps are instabilities in the net. If your computer and network devices were only handling AH, the network traffic could be described as a straight line (very simplified here!). If your computer checks for updates while you're playing, there will be spikes in that line, causing warps. Not to mention down-and uploading torrents in the background! So take a close look at what your computer is running in the background, shut down everything unnecessary before playing, go through the Settings in every program and disable their automatic updates. If you're like me, wanting to have the anti-virus on while playing, put AH in the exceptions list and do a manual update right before playing. It's unbelievable how often some programs of secondary value would like to check for updates: I can't understand the importance of checking for updates for a multifunction printer or a webcam daily or weekly? Even monthly is overkill and after a year or so there won't even be any updates for the product! Yet they will continue checking, causing traffic in the net. So reduce the amount of background processes and disable their automatic update checks to minimize the potential causes for warping at your end.
