PvPGN Tracking Protocol

This document covers how to successfully use the PvPGN tracker system with a custom unofficial Battle.net v1 server.

PvPGN is a custom C++ Battle.net v1 server that's widely used. Its tracker system is pretty trivial. The tracking system uses UDP on port 6114. To advertise a server on the tracking website, all an individual needs to do is send a UDP datagram packet to port 6114 at any of the tracking hosts.

PvPGN officially suggests submitting to the following trackers:

• tracker.pvpgn.org
• track.muleslow.net

Structure

The structure of the datagram packet to send is as follows:

(UINT16)      Packet Version
(UINT16)      Server Port
(UINT32)      Flags
 (UINT8) [32] Software
 (UINT8) [16] Version
 (UINT8) [32] Platform
 (UINT8) [64] Server Description
 (UINT8) [64] Server Location
 (UINT8) [96] Server URL
 (UINT8) [64] Contact Name
 (UINT8) [64] Contact Email
(UINT32)      Active Users
(UINT32)      Active Channels
(UINT32)      Active Games
(UINT32)      Uptime
(UINT32)      Total Games
(UINT32)      Total Logins

Note: All integer values should be in network byte order (big-endian).

All fields marked UINT8 are strings padded with nulls on the end (they behave as character arrays). They are not null-terminated strings but could be read as such. This rule means that the total datagram length is 464 bytes regardless of its content.

Encoding

The character arrays/strings in the datagram are not encoded and are interpreted as ANSI (not UTF-8). Unicode characters may be sent but may not appear correctly when printed on the tracker site.

Fields

Packet Version:

• This document covers version 0x0002. No other versions have been seen.

Server Port:

• The port that your Battle.net server is listening on (should be 6112).

Flags:

• Currently the flags field is ignored, however officially these flags are recognized:

  0x00000001: TF_SHUTDOWN
  0x00000002: TF_PRIVATE

  • TF_SHUTDOWN should be sent when the server is shutting down.
  • TF_PRIVATE should be sent if the server is private and should not be listed.

Software:

• The name of your server software, such as PvPGN.

Version:

• The version of your server, such as 1.8.5.

Platform:

• The platform that your server is running from, such as Windows or Linux.

Server Description:

• A short description of your server.

• In addition, you can suffix what products/games your server supports using this field. To do so, add a space and use string concatenation to combine any of the following:

  General Flags	Tag
  Chat	CHAT
  All Blizzard Games	ALL
  Open Battle.net (D2DV/D2XP)	OPE
  Closed Battle.net (D2DV)	CLO
  Full Ladder	LDR

  ---

  Games	Tag
  Warcraft II BNE	WC2, W2
  Warcraft III Reign of Chaos	WC3, W3
  Warcraft III The Frozen Throne	WCX
  Diablo	D1
  Diablo Shareware	DHR
  Diablo II	D2
  Diablo II Lord of Destruction	LOD
  Starcraft	SC
  Starcraft Broodwar	SBW
  Starcraft Shareware	SSHR, SHR
  Starcraft Spawn	SPW

  As an example, a description with the above tags could look like the following: Warcraft only!! W2W3WCX

Server Location:

• The location of your server geographically, such as United States.
• A country flag will be given based on the geographical location of your server's IP address.
• You can also override the automatic country flag with one of your choosing. To do this, prefix a colon followed by the 2-letter country code and a space. For example, :US United States would show the U.S. country flag along with the location United States.

Server URL:

• The website you wish to advertise with your server.
• A bug used to exist where prefixing https:// to this would cause the tracker to print http://https:// for this field. The bug has since been patched.

Contact Name:

• The username of the individual running the server.

Contact Email:

• The email address for the individual running the server.

Active Users:

• The number of users currently logged in.

Active Channels:

• The number of channels with an active user count (non-empty channels).

Active Games:

• The number of games currently in progress or being advertised.

Uptime:

• Your server's uptime in seconds. A value of 300 is equivalent to 5 minutes of uptime.

Total Games:

• The total number of games that your server has advertised to users since it's been up.

Total Logins:

• The total number of logins that your server has processed since it's been up.

What's Next

This protocol was invented over a decade ago in 2006, and has been lightly maintained with minor patches to the site, but the underlying datagram has remained the same.

There is an ongoing project to address some issues of the current version of this protocol. The pvpgn-tracker project maintained by BNETDocs and backed by PvPGN developers is set to replace the tracking sites that are in use today. Though this project is not production stable yet, it is the plan for the next version of the tracking protocol and its website.

A live version of the project can be found at pvpgn-tracker.bnetdocs.org and will accept solicitations from current PvPGN software. Be forewarned that it is in flux and subject to change at anytime. Check back to see when it becomes stable and ready for everyone.