The Virgin Monologue

Rzbg is a frequent guest on Group Quest, and the creator of many of the logos found on the Dawnforge list of shows, including the Dawnforge logo itself. A long time WoW player, Rzbg plays on the European realms.

This is All Things Azeroth! Your World of Warcraft Podcast.

Except right now, for maybe a 3rd of the UK, this isn’t their World of Warcraft, this is World of LagCraft.

There is some on-going dispute on the matter, mostly relating to the fact ISP’s and Blizzard are more interested in point the finger than actually finding the source of the issue, but at the present time it looks like, since Friday GMT, many many Virgin Media customers in the UK are experiencing between a 2k and 31,000 milisecond world latency, rendering opening a bag or summoning a mount, much less running a raid, an impossible task.

On friday night I assumed I was seeing the results of a housemate’s large downloads, and attempted to join my new raiding guild in an alt’ run to finally get my underachieving ass up to spec, only to find myself official paving stones inspector for most of the fights, as DBM warnings came in 5 seconds after I had been killed by standing in fire that wasn’t there and bosses that would teleport across the room after running on the spot for five minuets.

It had taken several days for the community to realise this might be an issue beyond their home home connection, but once the ball started rolling, the never doubted British ability to complain made it’s voice heard (well, the weather can’t keep us interested forever) the results of which are ever growing, here: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2423032926

Turns out a fair few of use are not only unable to play but vocally unhappy about it. Some have managed to secure Customer Support ‘gifts’ to say sorry off of either Virgin Media or Blizzard, depending on how well you complained, I fear the majority of us will remain just a statistic of ‘down time’

The over all picture we can draw at this point apparently is there is a packet-handeling fault somewhere between Virgin Media (and in some cases British Telecom) and Telia’ European ISP (although this doesn’t seem to affect all EU members of my current guild) before a possible bigger fault between that and Blizzard’s servers.

The problem can’t seem to rest entirely on EU ISP’s shoulders however, for while my Main on SWCartel was unplayable, and an alt’ on Nordrasil EU was similarly lag bound…. I was able to pick up a character on a server not touched since the launch of Wrath and game without issue. Some blame must lie on Blizzard’s realm servers.

Blame had been meted out to Virgin’s ‘traffic management’ of P2P traffic and recent changes to how Blizzard tags it’s packets, that they might be falling victim to this filtering – an idea supported by the fact games like Rift and HD streaming of on-demand TV where not effected by poor connections.

The word from Blizzard – at first on twitter I was told by Blizzard EU CS that they where aware of no issue – after linking them to the forum they announced they were now aware of an issue! (well it would be a little difficult to ignore a 40 page forum post) and where Looking Into It ™

I would argue at this point that this is yet another example that Governments and Corporations need to acknowledge that the Internet is not theirs to control, censor, legislate, or regulate. The genie is out of the bottle and the world is going to work beyond their control in the future as the expression of resource and idea has exploded beyond regional boundaries… but that’s a /rant for another day…

Meanwhile a huge chunk of the UK are unable to dip their toes in Azeroth, and not for the first time in recent months, because somewhere between Blizzard’s grand networking plans, and UK ISP’s desire to control what we access. Of course, in a move totally unusual to Blizzard forums, they have a lot of people dropping the /rant about it.

3 Days into the LagGate issue we see no blue-posts, no statements, and no immediate hope of resolution.

NB: The ISP in question here (Virgin Media) had slated the 27th of July as the day things would be fixed, and players have since found a work-around for Windows users. Check the EU Battle.net forums for details.

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