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I attend and work at a university where we have a packet shaper (an old Packeteer -- 3-ish years old or so) which relegates P2P traffic to the lowest priority in the queue in order to prevent P2P abuse (BitTorrent, etc.).

However, the game StarCraft 2 was just released, and from what I've been able to gather, it requires P2P to be available to play the game online.

We have already enabled all the ports that the game requires, but its P2P traffic, of course, is not getting through during peak network usage hours due to the high demand, making gameplay impossible outside the hours of 4am-6am.

As far as I know, I don't know a way to tell the packet shaper to not limit P2P traffic of only a certain type (i.e. StarCraft 2 P2P traffic). Is there a way to do this? Or would we need a different packet shaper?

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  • Most packet shapers worth their salt have definition updates that are released regularly. I would check with your vendor for available updates that might allow for such a granular exclusion.
    – MDMarra
    Sep 8, 2010 at 23:44
  • Unfortunately it is out of warranty and we no longer get updates... :(
    – Ben Torell
    Sep 8, 2010 at 23:53
  • @Ben - Most vendors will allow you to purchase a software maintenance agreement even after the initial warranty period has expired. A packet shaper is too important a piece of equipment to not have a contract on.
    – MDMarra
    Sep 9, 2010 at 0:20
  • The game content IS distributed in a p2p fashion, though I'm pretty sure the actual playing of the game uses a server.
    – Cory J
    Sep 9, 2010 at 1:28
  • @Cory Do you happen to know if P2P is used in setting up the game lobby? That's the place where it seems to start slowing down and timing out. I can't say as to how actual gameplay is because I can't get into any online games.
    – Ben Torell
    Sep 9, 2010 at 3:07

3 Answers 3

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Starcraft2 doesn't use real P2P communication between clients - all multiplayer network data gets routed via the Blizzard servers. So you simply need to add rules prioritising traffic to/from the Blizzard servers. Note that the blizzard server used will depend on your geographical region.

Alternately you could find out which port SC2 uses to send/receive its game traffic and prioritise that.

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I'm surprised you care to be honest, it's a game, that might be slower than the students wish - shouldn't they be studying etc? To me this is a policy, not technical, issue.

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    +1. Why would you bother with such things... Nov 17, 2010 at 15:18
  • Actually, it's not a policy issue. The policy is to allow gaming, and we want to do what we can to give the best service we can. After more investigation into the problem, we've found that the issue is not P2P after all.
    – Ben Torell
    Nov 25, 2010 at 16:01
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I don't think that device can recognize StarCraft 2 traffic. And if it did it should fall under a "game" category, not "p2p".

The problem can get a little complex. You may be having the trafic class queue saturated, or even the whole connection.

To be sure you could try create a rule (if the device supports it) to throttle certain IP or ports.

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