The Canadian telecommunications giant, in a letter released by Michael Geist late last week, confessed to intentionally slowing down traffic for users of World of Warcraft, citing the game’s peer-to-peer activity as the cause.
As reported on Saturday by The Next Web, Rogers Communication, a company they noted with a history of throttling various applications on their networks, suggests that users cease using the peer-to-peer system, which WoW uses to update the game, until a fix for the problem could be implemented in June. The release says that they are working with Blizzard to correct the problem.
The release was in response to a complaint sent by the Canadian Radio and Television Commission (CRTC), the Canadian answer to the FCC, addressing various reports their offices had been receiving from irate WoW players.
“fix for the problem”
What problem? The problem is Rogers has a crappy infrastructure. The appropriate fix is to work on your network, not negatively impact your customers.
If I were a Rogers customer, I’d be demanding credit for the services they’re unable to use because of the service provider’s unintelligent decisions.
Hi
I am Elise with Rogers. I would like to bring some details to this issue.
First, I want to mention that the management of the game is unintentional. As we explain in our letter, we have been investigating issues related to World of Warcraft (WoW). What we know today is that there is a problem with our traffic management equipment that is inadvertently slowing the game for some customers. While we have fixed some issues with a software modification, new problems have emerged that we expect will be addressed with a second software update in June.
We believe the problem occurs when P2P is running while simultaneously playing the game. If you are experiencing problems we suggest you turn off the peer to peer setting within the WoW game and ensure no other P2P file sharing applications are running while playing WoW. WoW does use P2P for software updates, but with this setting changed you should continue to automatically receive software updates through other methods.
This is only a temporary solution. We continue to work closely with the game manufacturer and our equipment supplier to help resolve this issue as soon as possible.
We also want to thank our customers for their patience while we are working on finding a fix for the issue.
@RogersElise, Hi, Elise. Thanks for dropping the comment over here. It’s nice to see corporations caring enough about their customers to actively engage in the online communities.
You say that a fix will be rolled out in June. Are there any more details you’d be able to provide on this? I’d like to put up another article here on The Gaming Vault based on this update, if you don’t mind.
If you’d like, you can send me any information to [email protected] and I’ll be glad to compose a follow-up article to this one.
@Joe Pomerening,
Hey Joe. I just replied to your email with these questions!
Elise