World of Warcraft may begin using IPv6 on Tuesday

Wed Apr 27 12:53:35 UTC 2011

On Apr 27, 2011, at 4:11 AM, Tim Chown wrote:

> 
> On 27 Apr 2011, at 00:21, Bernhard Schmidt wrote:
> 
>> Kevin Day <toasty at dragondata.com> wrote:
>> ...
>> To get ahead of the issue, we've put an IPv6 option into the World of
>> Warcraft interface with patch 4.1. So as IPv6 starts to become more
>> widely available the game will already be prepared to handle the switch
>> over. For most players, the IPv6 checkbox will remain grayed out until
>> IPv6 becomes available in your area. Once available, enabling this
>> feature will require WoW.exe to detect a valid IPv6 connection to the
>> internet on the computer you are playing from.
>> 
>> At some point in the future, WoW realm servers will be able to use IPv6
>> in addition to the current IPv4. If IPv6 is enabled, the game will
>> attempt to establish an IPv6 connection first. If unable to find an IPv6
>> connection, or if the IPv6 option is disabled/grayed out, the game will
>> make an IPv4 connection instead. This should not cause any connection or
>> performance issues.
>> ---
>> 
>> "At some point in the future" does not sound like we will see much IPv6
>> traffic immediately, but who knows. Is anyone seeing some traffic that
>> might point to IPv6 adoption on the servers?
> 
> I arranged a test this morning.  With a laptop running 4.1 on a dual-stack network the IPv6 option is greyed out under Network Options.
> 
> I'm assuming your suggestion that the Blizzard servers are not yet enabled is probably correct, but that the clients now have capability.
> 
> Would be interesting to know what they consider a 'valid IPv6 connection'.
> 
> Tim

Well, with full native IPv6 on ethernet using ARIN direct assigned addresses, it's still
grayed out. I'm going to send in a support request and ask why it doesn't work.

Owen