Yummy

One thing I really love to try in Japan is the crazy drinks some companies can come up with… Today I tried Suntory’s “Espressoda”. Hmmm, what a clever play on words to describe this beverage made of… sparkling coffee!

The idea is interesting, but this drink is, as expected, disgusting.The problem is that I expect a Soda to be refreshing. This is not the case here, as the aftertaste leaves the typical “salaryman coffee breath” taste/smell in your mouth.

And this is not helped by the fact that it really looks like some regular Cola. So as you drink it, just think very hard that this could have been some cola, left to rot in the fridge for hundreds of years (but that would, strangely, have kept its bubbles). Guaranteed gag reflex

It is, also, sweet. Not sweet enough for a soda, but maybe too sweet for coffee. And since it contains coffee, it contains caffeine (a heads up for those of you who would like to try but are worried of getting addicted… haha, no, I kid, that can’t really happen)

To its credit, the drink tastes as advertised, which is more than what can be said for more than half of the soft drinks I’ve found in Japan so far.

Although this is not preventing people in Japan from playing Daiblo3 or WoW, it prevent many potential customers from buying or activating these games in the first place.

More and more people are finding this blog while looking for solutions to the issue, and comment here with their own experience. The truth is, although Blizzard told me yesterday that they are still investigating on the issue, no progress has been made in the past 6 weeks to solve what should be a simple firewall issue on their load balancer.

Their customer service is dramatically minimizing the impact of the issue, as many of you told me the typical CS answer is to blame it on your browser or your isp. Those of you who, like me, have spent several hours on the phone with either Blizzard or your ISP know that the issue is on Battle.net’s server, and not here in Japan.

Nevertheless, there doesn’t seem to be any activity on Blizzard’s side to solve this problem. for those of you who can access the Battle.net site with either a VPN or your mobile phone, feel free to open a ticket to Blizzard’s Customer Service. Without hundreds of complaints, they won’t see there is an issue.

Note that this problem is not preventing you from playing either Diablo3 or WoW. I’ve done it myself, so if you ware wondering if you should buy the game or not, well you’ve got your answer. However, account activation, account management, help forums, etc… are on battle.net and you might not be able to access them. This means, among other things, that setting up your account for the real money auction house in Diablo 3 can be a major pain in the a##. Hopefully, like me, you can still access their site with your mobile phone, which will become your best friend for anything related to Battle.net account management

Greetings,

I appreciate you bringing this to our attention. I have forwarded along all of the information to our Web Coordinators so that the issue can be investigated. If I get any more information on the situation I will let you know. =)

Thank you for your time and feel free to let us know if you have any additional questions.

 

That was one week ago, and no news since then. I can still not connect to Battle.net through my home network in Japan. If you are running into the same issue and have access to a proxy or a VPN, please do open a ticekt to Blizzard here so that they realize this is impacting more than a handful of people.

Initial Situation

It has to be known that my previous server was in quite a bad shape. I know a web admin is supposed to optimize their website, but let’s face it, beyond install w3 total cache (as I mentioned here), I don’t have much time to spend on that.

• read: 5 Simple things to do if you are super busy but want to optimize your site performance.

As traffic increased to my site over the years, I was facing a situation where the server was working ok “most of the time”, but at critical times it would fail under the load (for example, when I would publish an exclusive article that brings lots of unexpected traffic).

The solution, since I didn’t have hours to spend on optimizing my website, was to get a better server. I went from a Celeron with 2GB of Ram to an i5 with 8GB of ram, let’s just say that that difference in performance was measurable … but so is the difference in the yearly fee for the server.

How to increase revenue when you increase your costs?

In order to compensate for this increased cost, I had to find new sources of revenue (I monetize mostly from ads). I gave up on some ideas such as putting more ads on the site, since it is pretty crowded with ads already.

My second idea was to increase traffic (since I have a new server, I wasn’t afraid of that anymore – note, as a website owner, being afraid of more traffic is really a situation you do NOT want to put yourself into). Which I did to some extent by creating a twitter account (to drive some external content), and by writing a bit more frequently on the site’s main blog. This had positive results which I will describe below.

Another way to bring more traffic was to create additional websites which I plan to get to a reasonable size / traffic with time, as a “long term” investment.

Surprising results after 2 weeks

All of these plans were quite “long term”, so I didn’t expect to see any change in my adsense revenue immediately. But what I saw in the past two weeks was actually surprising: me blogging more and getting more people through twitter brought me an increase of traffic by about 14%. In the same time, I saw an increase in adsense revenue by 34%:

Conclusion

It is difficult to draw any conclusion just after 2 weeks. Maybe my audience shifted from low revenue pages to high revenue pages (I can probably check that). But clearly, my pageview increase by 14% does not explain a 34% jump in ads revenue.

Is it possible that customers click more on ads because the site is more enjoyable to navigate now? Or is it that with my previous server, pages wouldn’t show up at all in some cases, which ruined the possibility for people to click on ads? Or could it be (this is one of my suspicions right now) that having a fast server is boosting my “quality” ranking on adwords, which makes me more attractive for the bidding system? (and therefore I am getting higher quality ads). I strongly think this is happening, as my CPC has increased and this is where the change seems to be coming from (and not from an increase in the number of clicks).

But again, I’ve seen huge increases or drops in the CPC once in a while, so it is difficult to judge for now. I have also seen discussions saying that google does indeed take page loading speed into account in many of their services, but to a limited extent. However I can say that so far, getting a better server has been a good investment for me, by opposition to a cost.

My last comment was that I opened a ticket to Blizzard in order to get them to fix the issue. The problem is not with playing any of their games, but accessing the battle.net website with a regular browser.

My investigations led me to believe that this situation started around June 10th, and that this is impacting Asian IPs, mostly from Japan. One could think this is some kind of anti-cheater measures, that some IPs get banned from accessing the Blizzard games, but this really doesn’t impact the game itself, just the website. It’s also worth mentioning that I do have a battle.net account, but only played with it once a long time ago, so there would be no reason for my IP to be banned, and even less for the entire range of IPs owned by my provider.

As a matter of fact, I ended up buying the game through a VPN connection, and I could play the game fine from my regular connection, so there’s absolutely no problem here.

The symptom is an impossibility to connect to http://battle.net, with your browser spitting out a message in the form “Connection Refused”.

Some people are in the same situation as me, and managed to post about their issues on the Battle.net forums, through the use of proxies or VPNs:

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5835833709

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5837014965

If you stumble upon this page, most likely you cannot read these posts on battle.net (although google cache might be your friend, try the text version), so I am reproducing them here:

Although I can connect to battle.net by wow client or diablo3 client,
I always can’t connect to us.battle.net via web browser from my house.

If I access to us.battlnet via http proxy, As you see this post, I can access to us.battle.net by web browser.

What does this mean?

This means, my computer setting is not problem, ISP I am using also is not probrem.

Please see following “curl” command output from my house when I could not access to us.battle.net.

D:\>curl -v us.battle.net
* About to connect() to us.battle.net port 80 (#0)
*   Trying 12.129.242.40… Connection refused
* couldn’t connect to host
* Closing connection #0
curl: (7) couldn’t connect to host

Dear blizzard, please forward above log to some proper network engineer.

An engineer who has network knowledge will understand this means,,

- DNS was ok because I could resolve us.battle.net as 12.129.242.40
- “Reset” packet was returned. When my computer sent “SYN” packet to us.battle.net,  us.battle.net returned “RST” packet.
- This is not a timeout. Any firewall didn’t drop my TCP/IP packet.

This means, I can touch us.battle.net via TCP/IP but someone closed my connection by sending “RST” packet.

Usually IDS or WAF do this kind of behavior. So I guess blizzard’s IDS or WAF rejected my connection. This is a problem.

Thank you for reading,
mir

and

Im connecting to my friend thru VPN in Canada right now to get access to the forums,  the problem I have is that I live in Tokyo, Japan and I can’t get on the battle net website, it says connection refused.  This is happening to 3 of my other friends in Japan and if you do a search on google on “can’t connect to battle.net from Japan” you’ll see massive thread on people who are also complaining about the same thing. This is the 11th day I’m playing diablo3 without being able to get on the website.  We can play the game fine we just can’t access the website.

We did tracert to battle.net,  the trace shows that our connection hops to 15 different locations until it arrives to att.net which is battle net west the we would get our connection refused.  This means our connection is fine and our isp is not blocking blizzard. I believe blizzard is massively banning forum ips in suspection to rmt activities, how ever this is affecting us normal players too.

Please don’t leave stupid comments like “did you check your anti virus program or browser settings to see if it’s blocking?”. As im not an idiot.  Reply if you know what you are talking about.  I have an i got an iPad, iPhone, laptop and desktop to tell you that it’s not our software setup that’s causing this.  This is happening Asia wide.

I also tried setting my DNs open DNs google and that’s no go.

Finally, here’s what was added:

I am typing this from the office and do not have access to my home machine here, but I did run a traceroute yesterday (although it is us.battle.net, not us.logon.battle.net, I will try this one tonight), which I am attaching as a txt file

I do not think there is a problem in the route.
As far as contacting my ISP, I have done that, which is why I am contacting you. They are 99% convinced that the problem is not on their end, but that battle.net is blocking some IPs. In particular, they told me they are not blocking your website on their end, and they couldn’t access battle.net from their test machines either.

Doing further research, a wget on my machine gives me this:
wget us.battle.net
–2012-06-17 11:09:58– http://us.battle.net/
Resolving us.battle.net… 12.129.242.40
Connecting to us.battle.net|12.129.242.40|:80… failed: Connection refused.

wget other pages such as google works fine. wget on another machine on another network, works fine.

Finally, you have to take into account that my problem is not isolated. Several people in Japan are reporting the same issue.
It is very possible that Blizzard is not fully aware of the impact of this problem, simply because people who have the problem have no easy way to contact you (since they cannot access the site or the contact form). Not everybody can have access to a VPN like I do.

More people with the same issue:

https://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5835833709

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5837014965

People with the issue in Japan:

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/119855-13-access-battle

http://wikiwiki.jp/diablo3blizz/?%BC%C1%CC%E4%B7%C7%BC%A8%C8%C4%A1%A1%A4%BD%A4%CE3#j81da8af

This last link is in Japanese, if you don’t speak Japanese, this is a thread with dozens of people complaining that they cannot access battle.net since sometime in June. Some people say it might be ipv6 related (again, a problem on Blizzard’s end rather than on the ISP, since I verified my ipv6/ipv4 compatibility with my ISP)

Additional note:
I could buy Diablo 3 from a VPN, and I can play it fine on my home network. So the issue is only with the website.

I’m hoping the length and details in my reply will help you find out a solution, and understand that I am not a regular user with a typical connection problem. There is a problem somewhere with your website, and you are preventing hundreds of people from even buying your game.

Additional references: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/119855-13-access-battle, http://wikiwiki.jp/diablo3blizz/?%BC%C1%CC%E4%B7%C7%BC%A8%C8%C4%A1%A1%A4%BD%A4%CE3#j81da8af

Hopefully there will be some move on Blizzard’s end soon enough

Yesterday my research led me to believe this had something to do with my internet provider in Japan. The issue seems to happen to some specific Japan providers, apparently liked to B Flets and/or ADSL. Providers being mentioned are OCN, Biglobe, and plala (I’m a plala customer).

I contacted my provider today, and after spending a few hours (!) with them on the phone, here is the info I got:

• There is nothing wrong with my browser, my widows configuration, my hardware (computer/router), my router configuration, or my router settings. Basically everything’s fine on my end
• Plala could confirm that they cannot access battle.net, or *.battle.net, with their IP.
• Their only conclusion now is that the issue is on Blizzard’s side, who are potentially blocking some specific IPs from accessing http://battle.net, for some reason.

I opened a ticket with Blizzard (that was not an easy task since I can’t access the site, had to access it through my phone which uses another provider), and we’ll see how it goes.

The suggestions to activate/deactivate IPV6 support on my router, or to switch DNS servers, did not help in my case. Plala technicians confirmed my settings were fine

I went to the diablo3.com website, which has a convenient link to buy a digital copy of the game.

This is what I get when I try to click on that link:

Hu, I heard Battlenet had some connection issues, I didn’t know it was that bad that I can’t even buy the game…

Update: This seems to be a problem specific to Japan, and specific to a few providers (mine is plala, but this seems to impact other providers, and NTT Flet’s in general).

Some people have been experiencing this issue since IPV6 Day, and this seems to be related to either router settings or on provider’s side. I have enabled my router’s ipv6 connectivity (I have a buffalo WHR-G301N), and tried to use google’s DNS servers (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) instead of my provider’s. This made things apparently a little bit better, as the site test-ipv6 tells me my DNS server supports ipv6 (which was not the case with my provider’s router).

Nevertheless, I can still not access Battle.net as of today, and it seems this is a pretty common issue in Japan right now.

Next step for me is to call my provider tomorrow and see if they have a clue

I’m not that big of an heroic fantasy fan, I’m more into science fiction usually. But the quality bar is extremely high on Game of Thrones, and it feels like each episode has the production value of a full length movie.

The costumes, landscapes, and sets are gorgeous and extremely well detailed. But what keeps me hooked to that show is the scenario and the perfect acting. The scenario is inspired by a best-selling series of books, and is extremely rich and full of cliffhangers. Almost each episode has a main character dying, or a gigantic sub-plot starting. The actors, as I mentioned, are also close to perfection, again, at a level close to a full-length movie production. It seems lots of thoughts have been put in selecting even second roles.

Even minor sub-plots involving romance are distilled smoothly in the main story, which make the relationships between characters even stronger. Also, many actresses in that show are absolutely gorgeous

The more I watch this show, the more I hate “The walking Dead” (or rather, the more I wish it had had the same budget as HBO’s production). Following my usual tastes in movies, The Walking Dead should be my favorite show these days. But every little thing in Game of Thrones is better than the Walking dead. The sets are richer, the scenario is much better, the characters have much more depths, and the acting is not even in the same league.

I’m pretty sure the budgets are different too… but the result is that I’ll definitely buy Game of Throne’s DVDs, while I’ll probably keep “acquiring” the Walking Dead on some alternate channels…

You might, or might not, be one of the poor souls that got their LinkedIn password stolen. Now, the important point is not to change your LinkedIn password (unlike what many sites are wrongfully saying), but to change your password on other sites, where you had been using the same password as on linkedIn. For all you know, the security flaw still hasn’t been fixed on LinkedIn, so changing your password there asap would be perfectly useless.

On the other hands, hackers will definitely try to reuse your old password and email on other websites, which is why it is important that you change those, not necessarily the linkedIn one (but you’d rather change that one once the issue is confirmed to be fixed, though).

linkedIn issued additional information in their blog today, containing more hints on how to protect your passwords on t3h internetz.

The campaign will soon be over, and is close to its stretch goal of 600k$, which would guarantee a Linux and Mac ports to be completed in time.

You might not be a Linux or Mac owner, and asking yourself “why would I pledge for a port of the game to those platforms, if it already is funded and guaranteed to be available for my platform?”

Let me me talk to the greedy person inside you then (come on, we all have one): today is your last opportunity to grab a copy of the game for 15$. 15$ is the minimum pledge that will give you access to the full game on Steam. Since Carmageddon aims to be compared to AAA titles (the first episode was the best racing game of the year in 1997.. Stainless are an inde studio, but they do not play in the same leagu as most indie games!), I think 15$ is extremely cheap for such a game (compare that to the typical 50$ you have to pay for games usually), and the price for “regular” people (people who did not pledge on Kickstarter) could be much closer to 30-50$ in my opinion.

Hence, today is probably your last chance to secure a huge discount on the game, if you pledge 15$

The Carmageddon kickstarter project can be found here!