I have been unable to play my main character, and the only reason I still play, for an entire day. After trying for countless hours to move 1cm down every logging without any results and after trying in multiple posts on forums to get any help until I finally went on the Support and to then realize the Support site, what is used to support players, is down for no reasons and unable to help.
I eventually made a Stuck character ticket, over 6 hours ago, still not answered and my character is still stuck. What kind of Customer Support is this ?
You got to give it some time. Yes, a ticket of your character being stuck is made priority, but even then, still will take time. GM’s does have to deal with thousands of tickets each day.
With the numerous attacks this month it isn’t unlikely that a larger portion of the playerbase is currently affected than is usual. Six hours can feel like a long time to get a response given the top priority of that particular ticket category, but given the frequency it doesn’t seem too outlandish in the grand scheme of things.
Do you have a ticket number? An SFA might be able to check and see where it stands when they have time, provided it hasn’t been answered by the time they get in in the morning.
There is a queue for ticket submissions, which can be several hours in wait times for in-game problems. Also, blizzard has been experiencing a string of DDoS attacks in the past few weeks and along with the backend forum website update, connection problems can occur.
May I ask if one of you knows, how come DDoS Attacks are so easy yet so undefended? We don’t see that happening with games having hundreds of millions of players like League of Legends or Fortnite, why is it literally every day in World of Warcraft?
I’m not altogether familiar with LoL, but there are different client-server architectures out there, each with their own benefits.
A game like WoW depends on central points to coordinate clients, because it’s a static world.
This has the downside of being easier to attack than games where, for example, a dozen clients connect directly to each other, and only need waiting rooms on the outside.
They have protective systems in place, yet the hackers somehow do a mass attack on blizzard. Even with the best protection protocols in place, it’s possible to get traction in their attacks.
DDos attacks happen all around the world it’s a whack a mole situation. Hackers are using 100s of millions of malware infected computers to do these attacks. And it take many years to get convictions on the people. If you don’t have anti virus, you should.
Protection against DDoS attacks, as in proactively preventing them, is impossible. The creators of such malware use thousands of infected computers (called a Botnet). The vast majority of those are hosted on residential PCs. Since those PCs are used by victims of malware, the only way to proactively protect (blocking) would also prevent legitimate use of a service. The very nature of DDoS attacks makes it impossible to proactively prevent an attack.
What you are most likely asking about is mitigation. Mitigation happens after a DDoS attack has started and is, in many cases, automated. The traffic coming from various sources is examined and blocked temporarily if a particular source is participating in the attack. It also involves human intervention to fine-tune the mitigation.
It’s also important to recognise the difference between a Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS). The distributed nature of a DDoS makes it impossible to proactively prevent as innocent people are often caught up in that and unknowingly participating in the attack. There’s no way to predict the sources of a DDoS attack before it begins.
A DDoS attack would be someone having hundreds of phone lines at their disposal. Through an act of deception, they posed as a technician from a phone company and installed a device on the phone lines of innocent customers. They instruct each line to call a specific phone number over and over again at the same time. There are innocent people involved in the attack. People who may have a legitimate reason to have called that number in the first place.
In a regular Denial of Service attack, it would be akin to me calling your phone number constantly. You could just block my phone number and that would be the end of it. Still though, you didn’t know my phone number before I did it, so you still can’t proactively prevent this attack either.
The only guaranteed way to prevent any sort of denial of service attack is to not expose anything to the internet at all. However, that would mean WoW would no longer be operational. Your favourite websites would be inaccessible. The internet would just cease to be.
I do highly recommend reading up about denial of service attacks as it would give you a better indication as to what is happening and why Blizzard (and other companies) can’t proactively prevent an attack.