Broadband Tech > IPv6 > World of Warcraft is getting IPv6

World of Warcraft is getting IPv6

That's pretty cool.

reply to Napsterbater
This is indeed pretty cool. Assuming Blizzard has done their homework, there should be practically no drawback; anyone with a native IPv6 connection who enables IPv6 in WoW shouldn't see a change in latency. The number of people that this applies to is just quite small, that's all.

Based on reading between the lines from a few forum reports by testers, it looks like it will refuse to enable its IPv6 setting if your only IPv6 transit is via an automatically tunnelling mechanism (6to4, Teredo). This is the correct approach; those mechanisms should only be used as a last-resort technique for connecting to IPv6-only hosts. I'd wager that no WoW server will ever be IPv6-only; if they roll out wide IPv6 support, it will be in a dual-stack configuration.

So, really, latency should only be higher for people who enable IPv6 in WoW but are connected to IPv6 over a static tunnel (e.g., hurricane electric, sixxs, etc); WoW will see that as a native IPv6 option, letting one enable IPv6 in-game, but such users will pay the penalty of routing through the tunnel provider rather than to the WoW server directly.

Oh! True. I'd forgotten that there are some transit providers out there who still don't do IPv6, and all the complexities that this sort of asymmetry can produce under BGP.

Assuming you're using a WoW server for your region, and both your ISP and the relevant Blizzard datacenter have native IPv6 transit, then it's reasonably likely that the backbone peering/transit linking the two under IPv6 would not be noticeably less direct than under IPv4, even if some of the finer details of the routing may differ.

Meanwhile, the effective in-game latency is often highly dependent on certain factors on the endpoints -- the load on the WoW server, on your PC, saturation of your ISP connection, etc -- that would be the same for both IPv4 and IPv6, and these factors are often more significant for game lag than the actual network latency.

By the time significant numbers of home users have native IPv6 connections -- and probably well before that -- I expect the vast majority of transit networks will be IPv6-enabled. It's almost a pre-requisite: ISPs can't introduce IPv6 to customers without transit, and non-IPv6 transit providers can't wait much longer before they'll start to run the risk of losing clients to their IPv6-enabled competitors.

I agree

reply to Napsterbater
I've got an IPv6 tunnel. Anyone have addresses for me to compare IPv4 vs IPv6 transit?

Tracert to www.v6.facebook.com vs www.facebook.com

C:\Users\Matt>tracert www.facebook.com
 
Tracing route to www.facebook.com [69.171.224.41]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
 
  1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  10.0.1.1
  2     2 ms     1 ms     1 ms  bng-gtwy.northstate.net [97.75.128.1]
  3     1 ms     1 ms     1 ms  juniper-1-ae-1.nstel.com [216.237.229.1]
  4     5 ms     5 ms     4 ms  te-3-2.car2.Charlotte1.Level3.net [4.71.126.45]
  5     4 ms     4 ms     4 ms  ae-11-11.car1.Charlotte1.Level3.net [4.69.132.165]
  6    22 ms    17 ms    17 ms  ae-4-4.ebr1.Atlanta2.Level3.net [4.69.132.162]
  7    10 ms    10 ms    10 ms  ae-61-61.csw1.Atlanta2.Level3.net [4.69.148.234]
  8    10 ms     9 ms     9 ms  ae-63-63.ebr3.Atlanta2.Level3.net [4.69.148.241]
  9    23 ms    23 ms    22 ms  ae-2-2.ebr1.Washington1.Level3.net [4.69.132.86]
 10    24 ms    23 ms    24 ms  ae-91-91.csw4.Washington1.Level3.net [4.69.134.142]
 11    23 ms    23 ms    23 ms  ae-4-90.edge3.Washington4.Level3.net [4.69.149.210]
 12    56 ms    23 ms    23 ms  FACEBOOK-IN.edge3.Washington4.Level3.net [4.53.1
16.62]
 13    24 ms    24 ms    29 ms  ae1.bb01.iad2.tfbnw.net [204.15.20.54]
 14    82 ms    82 ms    82 ms  ae8.bb01.prn1.tfbnw.net [74.119.79.200]
 15    82 ms    83 ms    82 ms  ae0.dr02.prn1.tfbnw.net [74.119.79.103]
 16    82 ms    82 ms    81 ms  po1022.csw01a.prn1.tfbnw.net [74.119.79.51]
 17    81 ms    81 ms    81 ms  www-16-01-prn1.facebook.com [69.171.224.41]
 
Trace complete.
 

C:\Users\Matt>tracert www.v6.facebook.com
 
Tracing route to www.v6.facebook.com [2620:0:1cfe:face:b00c::3]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
 
  1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  2001:470:e3a4::1
  2    27 ms    26 ms    26 ms  1.tunnel.tserv13.ash1.ipv6.he.net [200
1:470:x:x::1]
  3    24 ms    24 ms    24 ms  gige-g4-12.core1.ash1.he.net [2001:470:0:90::1]
 
  4    24 ms    24 ms    24 ms  2001:470:0:1bf::2
  5    27 ms    24 ms    24 ms  ae2.bb01.iad1.tfbnw.net [2620:0:1cff:dead:beef::
79]
  6    96 ms    96 ms    95 ms  ae14.bb01.sjc1.tfbnw.net [2620:0:1cff:dead:beef:
:128]
  7    96 ms    95 ms    95 ms  ae0.pr01.sjc1.tfbnw.net [2620:0:1cff:dead:beef::
8]
  8     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 

reply to Napsterbater
That's not really a fair comparison, relative to WoW: Facebook hasn't fully deployed IPv6, and traffic to www.v6.facebook.com doesn't necessarily terminate at the same servers as www.facebook.com (and, to top it off, for ipv6, Facebook is doing their own internal tunnelling that happens to kill traceroutes.)

With WoW's server architecture, connections to a given realm would have to terminate at the same server cluster for both IPv4 and IPv6.

From my understanding, as of right now the wow servers do not have access to native IPv6 connectivity within the AT&T datacenters.

Unless someone else has other knowledge, that's what I'm going with.

There's a strong possibility they could end up using a tunnel service of some sort to provide connectivity. (Likely HE).

reply to Napsterbater
Where is this option? icanhasnativeipv6 and want it.