World of Warcraft players encounter DDoS, queues after expansion's release
World of Warcraft players encounter DDoS, queues after expansion's release
World of Warcraft may be getting on in years but it has just received its fifth expansion pack last week. Titled Warlords of Draenor, it returns players to Draenor (albeit in an alternate reality), the world where the Horde originally came from. While players were eagerly anticipating adventuring and exploring this new area, few would've foreseen the unexpected reappearance of foes familiar to WoW veterans.
Warlord of Draenor (and everybody else without the expansion) players had to contend with not one, but two different threats. A DDoS attack (which seems to have been stopped) and an even more frustrating problem, the dreaded server queues.
Blizzard's servers were struck by the DDoS attack sometime last week, after the new expansion launched on Thursday. If you're not familiar with the term, a DDoS (Distribute Denial of Service) attack overwhelms a server with repeated connections, eating up all the bandwidth and not letting any new connections set up. World of Warcraft players were unable to log-in to their respective servers until the attack was finally repelled by Blizzard (the game's developer). This is just the latest in a series of DDoS attacks targeted towards gamers. Previously, Sony's PSN (Playstation Network) was hit by a DDoS attack in August and Activision's (the publisher of Call of Duty and Destiny) servers were also hit in September. Lizard Squad, a notorious group of hackers, have claimed to be behind these attacks although nobody has yet claimed responsibility for the Warlords of Draenor DDoS.
The other part of the problem is the reemergence of server queues. It seems that even Blizzard themselves didn't anticipate how big an impact Warlords of Draenor would have on its own players (and those who return with each new expansion). Its servers the world over were overloaded by the massive wave of people who tried to log in to play. This isn't the first time that World of Warcraft has experience something like this. When it launched more than a decade ago, the original World of Warcraft too had similar issues, prompting players to never log out of the game for fearing that once they do, they'd have to queue for hours (if not days) just to reenter their server.
As per the norm, Blizzard's message boards were soon flooded with tons of irate players with complaints, prompting the moderators to go into damage control mode, with constant updates on the status of the queues.
As of now, the queues seem to still be affecting players as seen in the latest thread from battle.net, although it seems to be much shorter.