Configuration

These tests were performed on a HP-Pavilion 15 laptop, on Windows 11, as the blizzard games are typically not supported on Linux sadly. It could be possible to run tests with Proton, and it would be an interesting to see in the future if this has an impact on the support of IPv6.

Errors encoutered

In the Starcraft II game, we received a message “You need to be logged in to play” while connected to the IPv6 network. This happens as soon as we try to connect to the game, and prevent us to play online.

Here is an illustration of the problem:

A similar problem also occurs in the World of Warcraft Classic game.

This is the exact error received when trying to launch the game:

This prevent us totally from launching the game…

Hypothesis about the cause of the error

We then decided to try to understand the problem using a packet trace. These trace is available using this link for Starcraft II and this link for WoW Classic.

In summary, the problematic requests are those:

  • Standard query 0xe939 A blzddist1-a.akamaihd.net
  • Standard query response 0xe939 A blzddist1-a.akamaihd.net CNAME blzddist1-a.akamaihd.net.edgesuite.net CNAME a1219.d.akamai.net A 2.21.22.169 A 2.21.22.154
  • Standard query 0x3fe5 A nydus.battle.net
  • Standard query response 0x3fe5 A nydus.battle.net A 37.244.28.104

In these trace, the server sends a DNS request for several domain names (blzddist1-a.akamaihd.net, nydus.battle.net), but only for a A record, while we would need an AAAA record. These domain name seems to be responsible for the connection of the player to his account and allow him to interact with the other players, explaining why we get the above error as it is impossible to connect to the login service.

We didn’t test all the games for this company, but having tried these 2 games, we can safely assume that the problem will be the same for all their game, as their DNS server seems to have no AAAA record. We verified this hypothesis, and indeed a dig command show that these records don’t exist.