World of Warcraft may begin using IPv6 on Tuesday

Tue Apr 26 23:21:14 UTC 2011

Kevin Day <toasty at dragondata.com> wrote:

> Anyone from Activision/Blizzard who would like to chime in with more
> details? :)

I'm definitely not from either of those, but I've found this link:

http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?locale=en_US&tag=IPv6&rhtml=true

---
What is IPv6?

Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the technology behind the
next-generation internet. IPv6 was designed to succeed the current
version of IP (known as IPv4) and solve many of the current version's
issues, such as the dwindling number of available IP addresses.

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?

Bernhard