When playing Ashen Empires recently, I've been experiencing uncommon and severe lag spikes and very frequent disconnects. After over a week of testing, I've narrowed the problem down to my ISP throttling this gaming activity because for some reason it's being interpreted as P2P activity.
Charter Communications (My ISP) has been known for traffic shaping, but it's not supposed to throttle gaming activity… only excessive bandwidth and P2P activity.
I've read that other MMORPGs have had the same problems recently with other ISPs (WoW and Verizon for example).
So my question is, how do I solve this problem? Is there a way to bypass traffic shaping for MMORPGs?
Best Answer
WoW is using P2P to distribute map data without putting load on their servers, this can be disabled. However WoW still uses ports that could be flagged as P2P. See this walkthough on how to disable the P2P data transfer for both the downloader and the client and see if that fixes your issue.
UPDATE:
Changed the link for the walkthough to one that includes another tip about disabling IPv6
UPDATE2: Didn't read the OP carefully enough, this is not a question about WoW.
For a general solution to your problem the only option you have is to find a VPN provider to tunnel out of your ISP's network and in to someone else. Now this will stop the trafic shaping but it will increase your ping times as you are adding a another destination the data must go through before it gets to you.
Update3: I don't know what county you are in but (after you have talked to your ISP) you can complain to the FCC or your local countries equivalent. They take those complaints very seriously.