Well, here’s an odd one. Last night, hundreds of furious World of Warcraft players took to Blizzard’s forums to voice their complaints about a bug that is making the game all but unplayable, which seems to have emerged from the recent 10.2 update. The twist? All of these players are located in Norway.
The issue was summarised by the Reddit user tastes-like-lemon on the r/wow subreddit, and it’s certainly unusual. According to the post, “Loading screens will very frequently freeze, and you need to ALT+F4 and relog to resolve the problem. This means you’re failing to load into m+, group finder content, PVP games and raids dozens of times every day during active play, and often getting booted from the group when this happens.”
The Blizzard thread where the issue was originally reported now stretches to 307 posts. The general consensus is that it’s a networking issue, with tastes-like-lemon stating that some users “are showing traceroute results that prove significant trouble routing past certain hops on the route to the IPs Blizzard uses for Norway.”
Yet while the issue seems to be affecting Norway exclusively, it isn’t clear that the problem originates in the country itself. One Norwegian player who goes by Xilong states in the thread, “When you look above on the people doing trace routes you will find that the steps within Norway are fine and it is the 137.221.78.29 node in the Netherlands belonging to Blizzard itself that is the issue, so 100% a Blizzard issue that Blizzard needs to fix.”
It’s also unclear whether the issue stems from the 10.2 update. One poster on the thread, who goes by Linariver, states, “I started having this issue 2 days before the patch hit,” while another, Phaseshift, says the issue “spans over multiple blizzard games” including WoW retail, WoW classic, Diablo IV, and Hearthstone.
Blizzard has yet to comment on the problem, either in the thread or any other kind of announcement. While the issue remains unresolved, some Norwegian users are managing to circumvent the problem by using a VPN to play the game through the networks of other nearby countries like Sweden and the Netherlands. But it goes without saying that this isn’t a long term solution, and Blizzard needs to address the problem as quickly as possible.
