Warlords of Draenor Launch Hit By DDoS

Blizzard entertainment (via Community Manager Bashiok) have detailed some interesting updates about the hot mess that has been the launch of World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor. Sorry guys, but garrisons have been a bit on the broken side, especially over here in Europe.

[Update] 9:00 p.m. PST

We'll be performing maintenance on all NA realms beginning at 5 a.m. PST in order to address issues with realm stability. We anticipate this process will last approximately 4 hours and appreciate your patience during this time.

[Update] 8:00 p.m. PST

Our top priority continues to be service issues impacting performance and long wait times on North American realms. We recently pushed a server change that caused disconnects, and as a result login services are heavily impacted as players attempt to (re)log in to the game. If you experience issues logging in, please be patient and wait a few minutes before trying again. We're continuing to work to address other stability and latency issues as well as make additional improvements in game performance.

[Update] 6:01 p.m. PST

We're continuing to work toward greater realm stability and address the service issues impacting latency. Our current biggest hurdle is the concentration of players in specific areas and zones, and an unexpected effect of that concentration on the realm stability. We're continuing to maintain a lowered realm population cap to help with the stability, which is resulting in increased queue times. We're seeing some increase in individual zones drop which are causing localized player disconnections as we get into prime time in the Americas, and if someone is disconnected they will quite likely run into a queue to log back in. Work is progressing on improving realm stability through fixes targeting individual in-game issues, as well as on the backend game and network services.

3:02 p.m. PST

We're excited to finally launch Warlords of Draenor and explore this new world with you, but we know that the experience has been less than ideal as we approach our first full day of launch. 

Europe was our first region to launch, and we encountered a few issues due to the sheer number of players attempting to enter Draenor from a single location. We worked to add multiple new ways to access Draenor, and this helped ease some of the initial rush into the new expansion as players were able to access it from their capital cities, as well as from the shrines in Pandaria.

While that solution helped a ton for our North American launch, we ran into a few other issues, including a distributed denial of service attack, that resulted in increased latency.

To help correct for this and other issues, we’ve temporarily lowered maximum realm populations. This means there will be high queue times experienced on high-population realms. 

Here are some of the other important issues we're currently working to address:

• Instance servers timing out, which may impact dungeon access
• Continent server issues, which are resulting in Player Not Found and disconnection issues
• Garrison server issues, which are resulting in phasing and performance issues

We'll post updates here as we make progress against these issues. Thank you for your zeal to face down the tyranny of the Iron Horde—and for your continued patience as we work to improve the current experience.

 

The interesting bit, is that section saying "we ran into a few other issues, including a distributed denial of service attack, that resulted in increased latency".

It's not the first time Blizzard have been on the receiving end of a DDoS, and it won't be the last. 

What it is, however, is perfectly timed to cause maximum disruption and ten thousand and one "BL1ZZ SUXX0RZ I WANNA REFUND" threads on Reddit.

The trials and tribulations of a developer and their server engineers are many and summed up perfectly by this tweet by Ion Hazzikostas, the Lead Game Designer on World of Warcraft.

Phone buzzes... important text? Nope, just hit my daily Fitbit steps target solely by walking to and from the server programmer office.

— Watcher (@WatcherDev) November 14, 2014