I have a rather technical issue and hoping someone from the Blizzard networking and peering team can assist. The general support inform me they don’t have any contacts in the network department and advise me to create this post. I have been dealing with my ISP for a month to resolve the issue. They have changed to 4x different network peering companies but they all appear to have the same problem. They appear to have reached their limit in solving the issue and have recommended to check with Blizzard directly as they have their own internal ISP and its possible they are rejecting some transit providers.
I live in New Zealand and play on the North American west coast servers. What appears to happen is that I connect to cable and wireless in LAX and then for some reason bounce over to the east coast then back to the westcoast. My ISP and I are under the assumption the the Blizzard ISP is rejecting peering with 195.2.7.5 making me take an alternative route. Possibly this has something to do with your old Chicago datacentre for Wow servers. Are you able to investigate this with your ISP/Networking team. My ISP believes it is out of their control. My usual latency would be ~130ms, I usualy sit in game now at around 205ms due to all my game traffic going over to the East coast then back to West Coast. Using gaming VPN companies does solve the issue but I don’t really want to pay an additional monthly cost to play the game.
Ticket: US102659451
This forum is supported by fellow players these days. You should direct your ISP here:
What method is being used to determine where the IP is “bouncing”? Where an IP is registered is often different from where it is physically located.
Have never heard of Blizzard blocking any peering partners in my 8 years of volunteer tech support here, but would be interested to learn more if it’s found to be the case.
I was directed by a blizzard employee to do this. I have given the ticket number that confirms this. They say the network team may get a hold of information on these forums and act on it.
Using both tracert and commercial probe tools. My ISP has confirmed my findings so this has been investigated at a high level and not just a low level end user.
This can absolutely be the case. peer de-priortisation or paid peering partners can have a real impact on networking routes. As well as old peering information for peer prioritisation. For some reason the peers are calling for traffic to route over to Chicago. It just happens to be that a main cable and wireless peering hub is in Ashburn Virginia. My ISP informed me that a peering attempt at the LAX cable and wireless to Blizzard was de-prioritised by the receiver. Therefore outside of their control. The receiver is Blizzard registered networks in LAX.
They either meant to link the Bug Report forum where devs have teams monitoring posts, or the CS agent may need further coaching on the current processes. The blues who used to participate in the tech support forums are long gone.
While I understand that net neutrality — which we just restored this year in the U.S. — doesn’t directly apply to paid peering relationships, I’m trying to understand who would benefit from not only deprioritizing OCE traffic into Blizzard, but giving that data a costly trip around the country.
The peers Blizzard uses in both locations are the same and would have to route the traffic back to Las Vegas (no WoW server in LAX anymore) from wherever it’s ending up. Plus, Ashburn is not close to Chicago (684mi or 1101km away), so this information sounds like it’s either out of date or just incorrect.
This connection problem isn’t affecting all OCE players, so hanging all blame on the Blizzard-registered peering node doesn’t really check out. Additionally, Blizzard has included some language suggesting that they are not responsible for how you connect to their game servers in their EULA, so I’m not sure how much further this would be investigated as a player reaching out.
Since I don’t think I’ve seen a network engineer chime in on the WoW forums before, I think your best bet is to convince the ISP to reach out via the email in the Peering Policy article I linked earlier.