World of Warcraft customers want Rogers fined for slowing down the game

This past weekend we reported that Rogers, a major ISP in Canada, had admitted to “accidentally” slowing down gameplay on World of Warcraft.

Customers have reportedly been experiencing problems since early January which prompted one customer to reach out to the CRTC, the department that governs ISPs in Canada, suggesting that Rogers was specifically targeting the game.

Rogers’ responded to the CRTC in a letter, admitting to interfering with the connection and advising customers to turn off P2P (peer to peer) settings within the game while ensuring that no P2P apps were running on the computer. Within the letter, Rogers also stated that it was working along side Blizzard, the developers of WoW, to get the problem solved and concluded that it “sincerely regrets the inconvenience”.

Teresa Murphy, a customer enraged about the World of Warcraft traffic shaping sent a letter to the CRTC on Tuesday declaring shenanigans on Rogers.  Murphy debunks Rogers’ claims and stated that World of Warcraft only uses P2P protocols while patching and it shuts down before the game engine opens. Also, there hasn’t been any patches for several weeks and prior to January, the problem never arose, according to Murphy.

In other words, “P2P is never used during gameplay” so Murphy posed a question to the CRTC “ how is it that throttling is triggered while gameplay is active?”

To make matters worse, it seems that Rogers had been ignoring the complaints first reported back in January and despite the fact that Rogers’ claimed it would “continue” to work side by side with the developers to fix the issue, Blizzard says it was first contacted by Rogers the day before it responded to the CRTC.

Murphy states that it isn’t just Wow being affected by Rogers throttling practices. Games such as “Starcraft II, Diablo, Diablo II, Heroes of Newerth, and Rift seem to be affected, as is Skype (a VOIP program which can compete with Rogers own Telephone service).”

On a side note, after we published our article on Saturday reporting the WoW slowdown we also mentioned that it had been happening with Skype. A Rogers rep swiftly responded to us via email telling us that “we do not manage traffic over Skype.”

We replied to the Rogers representative telling him that “in addition to my own issues, Leo Laporte from the TWiT network has mentioned many times during his show that when a guest is using Skype (with Rogers) the connection quality begins to degrade and often results in a disconnection.” We additionally asked him if he was “100% sure Rogers has never affected the quality of Skype” and asked him if he would go on record stating that Rogers wasn’t affecting the Skype app. We’ve yet to receive a reply back.

Players of World of Warcraft currently pay roughly $15 per month for a subscription and Murphy is asking the CRTC to fine Rogers for throttling the game without CRTC approval. What are your thoughts? Should Rogers be forced to reimburse customers for the slow down?

Thank you Michael Geist for posting the letter on Facebook.