Blizzard Addresses WoW DDoS Attacks

Blizzard Entertainment has once again found itself in a sticky situation. For the past few weeks, Blizzard’s game servers have been bombarded by frequent, severe Distributed-Denial-of-Service (“DDoS”) attacks. These attacks overload the game servers with huge amounts of illegitimate traffic, which means they’re likely to cause anyone playing games whose servers are affected to experience significant latency issues and disconnections from the server.

As annoying as this is to deal with in general, these problems can be a literal matter of life and death for characters on official “Hardcore” World of Warcraft servers. Blizzard has now responded to community outcry caused by these attacks.

For those unfamiliar, “Hardcore” World of Warcraft is an official version of World of Warcraft Classic in which character death is permanent. Characters who die in Hardcore can’t return to life by returning their ghosts to the locations of their death, nor can they be resurrected by players with access to appropriate spells. Certain class-specific abilities that normally allow player characters to resurrect themselves, like a Warlock’s Soulstone and a Shaman’s Reincarnation, are also unusable on Hardcore servers. If you die in Hardcore for any reason, all your now-dead character can do is chat with the ghosts of other fallen players.

Outside of that, your only option is to create an entirely new character and start over. Blizzard’s game servers are infamous for frequently causing players to disconnect at particularly inopportune times for reasons that have nothing to do with the recent wave of DDoS attacks. Though there has been an outcry from players whose characters have died as a result of these random disconnections, Blizzard has stuck to the stance that they will not resurrect Hardcore characters that die because of more common issues like this. Blizzard maintains that helping players in this way contradicts the intended Hardcore WoW experience.

However, Blizzard has now stated it will make exceptions to this rule for players who have lost characters specifically due to the recent DDoS attacks. In a statement on the matter, Blizzard said the following: “As we continue our work to further strengthen the resilience of WoW realms and our rapid response time, we’re taking steps to resurrect player-characters that were lost as a result of these attacks. Unlike the many other ways characters can die in Hardcore, DDoS attacks are an intentionally malicious effort made by third-party bad actors, and we believe the severity and results of DDoS attacks specifically warrant a different response.“

Blizzard went on to add: “In the future, Blizzard may elect – at our sole discretion – to revive Hardcore characters that perish in a mass event which we deem inconsistent with the integrity of the game, such as a DDoS attack.” Blizzard clarified that the more “usual” issues like smaller-scale server disconnects, lag spikes, and in-game bugs don’t count as grounds for Blizzard to help players recover their dead characters. Even though this is likely going to deal a blow to Blizzard’s public reputation as it is, the timing of Blizzard’s response is adding more fuel to this fire of controversy.

Specifically, Blizzard’s statement comes after a quite popular in-game guild comprised of prominent Hardcore WoW livestreamers, known as “OnlyFangs,” was significantly negatively impacted by these DDoS attacks while in the middle of an in-game raid. Whether this guild’s misfortune and the popularity of its members have anything to do with the timing of Blizzard’s response remains to be seen. However, that certainly hasn’t stopped some portions of WoW’s player base from claiming that the only reason Blizzard is acknowledging that this is a problem (much less tangibly addressing it) is because it affected an entire guild of popular WoW streamers.

I intend to share my two cents on this whole kerfuffle and the optics of Blizzard’s decisions in a separate article. For now, all I can do is conclude this report with the remaining available information. At the time of writing, Blizzard has not publicly said how they’ll determine which players qualify to have their characters resurrected, or whether or not affected players will have to first reach out to Blizzard for help. Blizzard did, however, mention that their Customer Service cannot help players whose characters died as a result of anything other than these DDoS attacks.