Comcast Packet Spoofing and Blizzard Download

#0 - Dec. 4, 2007, 7 p.m.
Blizzard Post
With the recent public news (those of us who have Comcast "high speed" internet were already aware something was going wrong) of the deliberate packet spoofing whenever anyone for any reason initiates a bit torrent session, what changes, if any, is Blizzard planning to take?

In the past, disabling the peer-to-peer portion of the downloader results in a download, in terms of time, even longer than proceeding with the choppy peer-to-peer.

Comcast has a lot of subscribers - how many? I do not know. What percentage of these subscribers also play WoW? Once again, I do not know the amount. Are these people a significant portion of the WoW install? Not certain but I could hazard a guess.

There must be a better way to push upgrades and patches to the end user. Other online subscription games manage this without bit torrent.

If the peer-to-peer scheme is going to continue for the foreseeable future, is there a work-around on Blizzard's end which can somehow ignore these spoofed packets? Something the end-user can do other than switching providers? Many cannot simply switch high speed providers - we're locked into high speed with Comcast or nothing.

Thanks for you time,

Xakopane
#1 - Dec. 4, 2007, 7:10 p.m.
Blizzard Post
Hello Xakopane,

I do not know of any plans to change the way we distribute our patches.

The peer to peer option in the Blizzard Downloader can be disabled, as you've mentioned.

The other way to get our patches is through our mirror sites, which are listed on our support page below:

http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?articleId=21079