Blizzard's network is sending IP traffic to The Netherlands

Technical Support
1

I’m re-posting these findings to ask Blizzard why my IP packets are being sent back and forth to The Netherlands when I live in the US. I’m hoping it could be the reason for the high latency which has made the game unplayable.

I was able to reproduce the 100% packet loss in Blizzard’s own network, starting at ae1-br02-eqda6.as57976 net. (This was after it left Comast).

I discovered that the IP route at the hop of :ae1-br02-eqda6.as57976 net and et-0-0-2-br02-swlv10.as57976 net is actually going to The Netherlands, even though I am in NA - no wonder there is latency.

IP Details For: 137.221.74.35
Decimal:2312981027
Hostname:ae1-br02-eqda6.as57976 net
ASN:57976
ISP:Blizzard
Services:Datacenter
Assignment:[Likely Static IP](https:// whatismyipaddress com/dynamic-static)
Country:Netherlands
State/Region:Noord-Holland
City:Amsterdam

IP Details For: 137.221.65.67
Decimal:2312978755
Hostname:et-0-0-2-br02-swlv10.as57976 net
ASN:57976
ISP:Blizzard
Services:Datacenter
Assignment:[Likely Static IP](https:// whatismyipaddress com/dynamic-static)
Country:Netherlands
State/Region:Noord-Holland
City:Amsterdam

Redacted below. First line is Comcast, the rest Blizzard, staring with going to Blizzard’s servers in The Netherlands. So the IP route leaves Comcast at 66.208.216.198 and the travels to these two hops and 137.221.68.77 - in The Netherlands - and then times out. After that it finishes the last hop in Irvine at 24.105.30.129.

| 66.208.216.198 - 3 | 3406 | 3322 | 21 | 32 | 182 | 31 |
| ae1-br02-eqda6.as57976 net - 3 | 3407 | 3323 | 46 | 55 | 277 | 53 |
| et-0-0-2-br02-swlv10.as57976 net - 3 | 3388 | 3299 | 47 | 59 | 745 | 53 |
| No response from host - 100 | 752 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| No response from host - 100 | 752 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 137.221.68.77 - 3 | 3387 | 3298 | 46 | 52 | 191 | 48 |
| 24.105.30.129 - 3 | 3403 | 3318 | 46 | 52 | 209 | 53 |
|____________|||||||
WinMTR v0.92 GPL V2 by Appnor MSP - Fully Managed Hosting & Cloud Provider

I’m sorry but the game that I paid early access for was basically unplayable due to rubber banding/lag spikes. I can’t even walk around in or out of a city/town without rubber-banding every 15 seconds. I nearly die in fighting any monsters. I’ve even turned off cross-play in the Options and it didn’t help.

In-game Latency goes from 30s to nearly 1000ms sometimes.

No issues with WoW or other games. And the D4 Open Beta worked great on my same Win11 PC/network. Changing graphics settings has no effect (FPS is not a bottleneck on my RTX3080).

Diablo vs. WoW WinMTR Tests:

For Diablo, my WinMTR tests generally show ~10% packet loss along all hops after my router to 24.105.30.129 (D3 endpoint listed Blizzard Support - Connection Troubleshooting 1).

For WoW, my WinMTR test shows ~2% packet loss to 24.105.62.129 and 137.221.105.2.

Above is a recent WinMTR as of this morning to the D3 IP (there isn’t an IP listed for D4). It shows my traffic being sent to The Netherlands.

I opened a case with Comcast and they even sent out a tech and Comcast found zero issues. I get 400Mbps consistently down and about 6Mbps up. No other latency in other games/apps.

2

137.221.68.77 isn’t in the Netherlands. While it may be allocated to Blizzard’s Netherlands organization, the latency in the MTR makes it impossible to be there. There’s no rule that IPs allocated in a specific region have to be used in that area. East coast US<>Europe latency is usually at best 60ms. West<>East coast is at best about 60ms. Your best for the last hop on the path is 46ms, which is impossible for traffic leaving the US without changing the speed of light. The eqda6 hop is likely a connection at an Equinix datacenter in Dallas, and swlv10 is probably SwitchNAP Las Vegas, which tracks for heading to Los Angeles.

First hop you showed is Comcast, and they hand off directly to Blizzard (AS57976), so this is about as direct of a connection one can have. The one interesting thing I notice in the MTR is the consistent latency for all the Blizzard hops, which is usually a sign of an MPLS network, so the last hop ends up egressing all the ICMP replies back to you.

At the network level, those metrics look reasonable for traffic to LA from somewhere in the central US. There’s a little bit of loss, but it’s 3% throughout the MTR, indicating it’s from earlier in the path, either that first hop included, or previous to it.

3

Appreciate the reply. But I think the problem is clearly on their end, since my PC/network works totally fine with everything else - except Live D4. WoW (and all other games, including the D4 Open Beta) work fine on the exact same setup.

A quick search for “latency” is pretty indicative of a wide-spread issue:
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/d4/search?q=latency

4

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