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Video Game Path of Exile Classified as BitTorrent and Skype

Author: Luis Fernandes

Overview

The Video Game Path of Exile is a game that can connect up to four people to play the game cooperatively together online. Even the single-player component, playing the game by oneself, requires a sign in to the Path of Exile servers in order to choose a character and play the game. This sort of 'always online' infrastructure requires a decent internet connection that is not obstructed.

Found on the Exinda ExOS version 7.4.1, the game Path of Exile is incorrectly classified as BitTorrent traffic. This can lead to some complications in environments that throttle and/or entirely block BitTorrent and P2P traffic by using policies in the Exinda. Furthermore, it is also seen that some of the voice infrastructures that Path of Exile uses for 'team chat' are classified as Skype. 

This article provides a fix for this issue.

 

Root Cause

Path of Exile, as is common with a lot of other multiplayer games today, use a Peer To Peer backend for the connections, instead of providing a significant amount of dedicated servers and other resources for the players. In the Exinda, with how BitTorrent detection works, that algorithm is taking the P2P traffic from Path of Exile and determining that it is (or can be used as) BitTorrent traffic, when the 'BitTorrent Sensitivity' setting is either on 'Medium' or 'High' (Configuration > System > Setup > "Monitoring" tab).

 

Resolution

There are two potential workarounds that can be done at this point in time to let the traffic through:

  • Change the BitTorrent Sensitivity to 'Low'. It has been tested, and while the traffic will still show up in the real-time monitor and other monitoring reports classified as 'BitTorrent', it will be let through the detection algorithm as legitimate traffic.
    NOTE: This has the side effect of lowering the Sensitivity on a global scale. So other applications will be judged to the same level, and as a result, some actual BitTorrent or P2P traffic will be let through the system.
  • Create a network object containing a list of the servers that Path of Exile uses (contact Exinda TAC for assistance), and create a policy in the optimizer that has a lower policy number (closer to 0) than the P2P policy in the hierarchy that allows all traffic to/from those servers.

Exinda is currently working on a Path of Exile L7 definition for a future release.