Starcraft 2 - 0day Download Experience - Boosted
The wonderful Starcraft 2 Wings of Liberty has been released earlier this week, and as a hardcore fan of the original game, wanted to get it just as it roll out, which meant the environmental way of downloading a digital copy.
If you happen to know Blizzard ( the magnificent ! ), their distribution tool is based on 2 channels, one which is the direct downloader over HTTP, and the other which is P2P based. which is the main issue when a new game rolls out, since there werent enough ppl that could share parts, and thus rendered the download for me ( in Israel ) to 90Kbps total, which is about 900Kbps under my acceptable ratio.
So i decided to go for the following – first i will download over a VM in the normal way ( so i could share like a normal user ), but i wanted to play right away (why else would i buy at day 0 ? :) so i had a second download running in the same time on my main computer, which i wanted to “tweak”.
When looking into the Log in the downloader i found the tracker ( the distributor of the list that is used to connect beteen the P2P users ) and found it to be http://eu.tracker.worldofwarcraft.com
then i ran a DNS Lookup on the FQDN of : eu.tracker.worldofwarcraft.com and got back a single resolution to - 80.239.178.125
In the following step, i configured a Firewall Rule to block any traffic from my computer to that IP Address, in order to prevent the sharing distribution.
so i still let the VM download, so i would share the bits to let other users play, but i also started enjoying this fantastic game right away!.
Way to go Blizzard !
