World of Warcraft may begin using IPv6 on Tuesday

Wed Apr 27 11:11:02 UTC 2011

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