Fear not dying, but never having lived - Mexican adage
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Virgin Media tries to WoW its subscribers
BROADBAND INTERNET PROVIDER Virgin Media has been forced to cobble together a fix in order to enable its customers to play World of Warcraft (WoW) on its network.
An update to the popular massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG) had left users on Virgin Media's ADSL service with ping times on the order of seconds, a situation that rendered gamplay all but impossible. The firm told The INQUIRER that it has now put in place a hack of sorts, which should mean that users who aren't on its local loop unbundled (LLU) services regain playable ping times.
The situation came about after an update issued by WoW developer Blizzard resulted in the game's traffic being classified as peer-to-peer (P2P). This in turn caused gamers to fall afoul of Virgin Media's traffic management policy, which throttles P2P connections during peak times. A Virgin Media spokesman told The INQUIRER that the recent updates also affected other Internet service providers (ISPs) including O2.
Virgin Media told The INQUIRER that the problem affected around 100,000 of its 4.1 million subscribers, and only a small percentage of those subscribers actually play WoW.
Virgin Media said that it operates a white-listing policy for online games, meaning gamers do not suffer from traffic management restrictions. In fact the traffic management systems deployed by many ISPs, including Virgin Media, often try to protect users such as online gamers from network congestion by those who download data on P2P networks such as Bittorrent.
In a forum post to its customers, Virgin Media said that the problem occured because "gaming companies are not prepared to share the updates with Virgin Media or traffic management suppliers prior to its release". The firm's spokesman claimed that WoW now presents "a new type of traffic".
The spokesman said that Virgin Media was "committed to resolving the problem" and that it has recently been in talks with Blizzard to correctly characterise WoW traffic so that it will not be classified as P2P traffic by its monitoring systems.
However that process will take some time to implement and as a stop-gap measure Virgin Media told The INQUIRER that in the last 24 hours it has eliminated the category of traffic management that WoW users fell under in order to try to ensure acceptable performance for its customers. For its customers, that might not be the end of the battle against the ping times, as the firm confirmed that there were "still a few issues" that needed to be sorted.
Routing issues at Swedish telecoms giant TeliaSonera are to blame for some Virgin Media users being unable to connect to other gamers on WoW, said Virgin Media. It is not clear whether Virgin Media buys IP transit direct from TeliaSonera or whether this issue is something out of its direct control, but losing connectivity to one of the world's few true Tier 1 networks is a development that warrants some concern.
This sorry saga goes to show that traffic management policies such as those deployed by Virgin Media and many other ISPs can result in frustration and, judging by the forum posts, loss of business.
WoW gamers on Virgin Media are unlikely to savour the irony that the very system that was designed to enhance their gaming experience has ultimately resulted in their downfall. Virgin Media's spokesman was adamant that it could have avoided this damaging turn of events by saying that it was "forced into this situation" by not being consulted prior to the rollout of the latest WoW patch.
Although there is more than a bit of finger-pointing going on here, it does seem that Virgin Media is trying to sort out this mess, even taking pragmatic steps to ensure its users can play WoW. It remains to be seen if games developers such as Blizzard, which generates significant revenue from WoW subscriptions, will work closer with the big ISPs in order to safeguard its revenue model.
The obvious solution would be to ditch traffic management policies altogether, but since that is highly unlikely, users must hope for better cooperation between developers and ISPs to ensure smoother gaming in the future. µ
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WoW is the only game not working, Virgin's traffic management seems to stop P2P based games on Playstation 3 like Call Of Duty, FiFa 11 they all get pings of 100ms+.
I tried contacting them, and they said their was a problem and said they'll fix it; however 5 Months down the line and no fix at all...
I'm leaving A.S.A.P...
Virgin Media are trying to pass the blame for this screwup onto blizzard
quote
The situation came about after an update issued by WoW developer Blizzard resulted in the game's traffic being classified as peer-to-peer (P2P).
If so why has this also effected Warhammer online and Aion, both MMO's that i play and am experiencing the exact same problem with and why are there numorous reports on virgin medias forums about this effecting other MMO's such as star trek online and champions of the gods.
Did all these MMO's update at the same time and change the way the packets are sent, i dont think so.
You, sir, are either a fool or a Virgin employee.
If Virgin are unable to support and even improve their infrastructure based upon the prices they are charging, then they should *increase their prices*, rather than pretend to offer a cheap service that *doesnt actually work as advertised*.
It is not my job - or even within my ability - as a potential Virgin customer, to evaluate their broadband offerings to determine which ones are "really" sustainable based upon dozens of criteria, many of which are unknown (and indeed unknowable) to me.
Thus, if they claim to offer say 50 Mbps for blah amount, I have to take that at face value. If it later turns out that they misrepresented their service, then that is my fault... how, exactly? If they should realistically be charging 10 times as much, then I am supposed to do... what, exactly?
The simple fact is that Virgin lie about their services, because they know damn well that all their competitors (ie, BT) are lying about *their* services as well.
And they all get away with it because they have the support of fools like you, who blame the users for their own lies, greed and incompetence.
Not that I PERSONALLY intend to join The Hoard...
if you want the tech stuff, what are you doing at virgin????
go to the other small ones, that have the *time* to consider stuff like that, instead of the idiots who just want 'an internet'...
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/review/top10.php
so you will be using O2 Then????
(you HAVE read the full article, have you not???)
As for others complaining about "why don't virgin spend more on improving the network?"..
WHERE do you think they will get the money for that, in the face of people that wont PAY for the ISP to do it, as well as them inheriting a god-awful system from NTL...
It is like your company giving you a 'new' van (its all we can afford mate, honest..:( ) for you to find it is in very bad condition, you will have to work hard on it, before you can use it to start earning money...
It is the greed of the users, buying a cheap product, and then moaning that it does not perform as well as one costing 10 times as much!!
...but when I pay for an internet service I expect all 65535 ports to be treated equally. If you only get the full service on 80,443 and 25 it really shouldn't be called an internet service.
ntl, er I mean Virgin cable surfing has been noticeably clunky lately.
Granted its pretty subjective and hard to be sure without a stop watch and a large dataset from ...the before time.
However I didn't want to let slip this opportunity to stick my boot in just in case it results in a better service.
A couple of year ago, it seemed to me that VM went for it Subscriber Traffic Management system because no one would sell them a traffic shaping system and guarantee it would work with their high levels of network traffic.
Now a couple of years later, I think someone has sold them a traffic shaping system, but it doesn't work as advertised. It's killing P2P and Usenet down to a tiny fraction of what it should be, and stalling out web pages and youtube/streaming. The system obviously cannot handle the traffic, and because every packet has to be checked to see if it needs to be slowed down or not, everything is grinding to a halt.
VM should have spent the money on improving the network so that people can use all these high-bandwidth services they are selling 50mbit, and now 100mbit services for. Instead, VM are spending money preventing people from doing anything more than a bit of browsing and email - things you can do without these high bandwidth and high cost packages.
Virgin blames Blizzard for Virgin's failure to manage their available bandwidth to adequately support all of Virgin's customers? Were I a Virgin customer, I'd be looking for a new ISP immediately, as Virgin has clearly failed to meet their contractual obligations, and their product is not fit for purpose, as such.
Blizzard's updates are reportedly distributed using the BitTorrent P2P protocol - a technology used by many companies (including Facebook and Twitter) for efficient file transfer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_(protocol)#Software
One way Blizzard might mitigate the impact to ISPs would be to leverage BitTorrent's new µTP protocol launched earlier this year. It's an intelligent congestion-sensing protocol that reroutes BT traffic around clogged areas of an ISP's network. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Transport_Protocol
Thanks,
Allison
BitTorrent Inc.
Meh, if I was managing traffic at Virgin, I'd stick a 5sec lag on all WoW traffic.
Game sucks and ppl should stay well clear of it ....
.. play Age of Conan instead .. its superb