Unlikely to happen, since this particular DDoS attack was clearly aimed at a streamer guild as opposed to Blizzard as a company. This means there’s very little incentive beyond “I am messing with streamers in order to mess with streamers.”
DDoS:ing is simultaneously both an extreme thing to do … and not really that extreme to do at the same time. If you live where you can easily be arrested, it is a damn stupid and extreme thing to do! But… if you live across the planet and you have enough anonymity making it neigh on impossible to know who you are?
Folks do it for laughs at that point. Hell there’s people have historically done it for the laugh of it but using Blizzard’s own means (making it both allowed by Blizzard and not against the law aka. illegal) by simply just buying a metric ton of accounts and having them active all at the same time in a very small area.
There’s been plenty of stories over the years of multiboxers with 50+ accounts crashing servers whenever they login and they do it just because they find it funny to do so. This was back in the day when Blizzard’s server infrastructure was worse but the point is that … folks regularly crash servers just for the lulz of it.
I understand all that but we had DDoS people before, and if they see a guild or streamer or whatever leave, why would someone who is also extreme not take that path? We currently have tons of crimes of all sort just because clout, someone got famous for crimes.
Don’t cherry pick words out of context to further a narrative.
Maizou claimed their philosophy changed. I quoted where they said the philosophy hasn’t changed. You twisted the meaning.
I honestly don’t know why y’all care in the first place. This whole drama fest with streamers and whining was ridiculous to begin with. It’s all just dumb and meaningless.
Streamers, objectively, destroyed the first run of Classic, and are directly responsible for sucking all the actual life out of the world by encouraging their lemmings to spam specific dungeons instead of explore Azeroth to level. Now, they have managed to get Blizzard to rescind a rule that goes back to the first day Diablo II was available on Battlenet.
Not sure if you realize this, but WoW itself is optional so I don’t see how this diminished my point at all.
Criminals commit crimes; Blizzard’s actions here simply encourage future DDOS because it’s now been proven to be an effective way to get Blizzard to change policy.
Nah, it’s not. Like I said it is very common for DDOS to be used as a tool of extortion. Blizzard has shown it will compromise its policies in response to DDOS.
I’m unaware if Blizzard has ever paid ransomware to DDoS:ers but… this isn’t even remotely unusual. During expansion releases, most MMOs typically get DDoS:ed and that’s something developers just have to be aware of when developing MMOs now’a’days.
Hell, Warlords of Draenor had one of the worst releases because it crammed people into a small space and then they got DDoS’ed for days on top of that. If there had been a ransom posted by a group back then, would Blizzard have paid them off just to reduce the amount of stress on their servers whilst getting stuff setup in the short term?
Maybe, because that’s kinda the business side of DDoS attacks. There’s always ways to limit the impact of a DDoS attack, so the point of a DDoS attack is now’a’days typically not to shut down servers but to limit their usefulness to extract ransom in the short term if the DDoS-attacker is doing it for monetary purposes.
It is unlikely to matter in Onlyfangs’ case since they clearly did it just to mess with streamers.
Because people who do this for fun are the same people who decide to hack into government plants just to see if they can do it. Basically the difference is that folks who DDoS for fun have a different personality matrix and find it fun to see how much and how severely they can mess with people.
In short… people do it because people do stupid things for fun, even if what they find fun is abhorrent according to other people. It is the same reason why kids hack nuke silos and why every few months there’s some War Thunder-player who releases classified military plans of some kind of tank to try to win an online argument.
People do it because people find dumb stuff fun, and people are dumb. Some are just dumb-smart people, and others are dumb-“I can do the barebone basics of a hacking attack so I’m gonna do that for fun.”
Because you think them putting an asterisk on permanent death in hardcore classic in cases of extreme circumstances is somehow relatable to the rest of their versions of WoW.
Doing nothing would have meant they could just send out occasional ddos attacks until everyone quit. Something had to be done.
I think they could have skipped the roll back and just added in protection, like kicking your character out of the game world if you d/c, but blizzard chose a roll back instead.
They said they’d do a roll back due to the circumstances, man. It’s not like they forced them to remove blood elves or postpone a season.
Sounds to me like they’ll upgrade from “I can make streamers cry” to “Hang on, blizzard did nothing! I can shut down an entire game mode if I keep doing this!”
Would normal players keep playing if they’re rolling the dice on server stability every day because blizzard does nothing?
That’s one of the problems, Blizzard brought back the target of the DDOS in the first place; this alone is encouraging further DDOS that will impact millions of other gamers solely for the benefit of a couple dozen streamers. Blizzard is compromising HC by changing policy to benefit a handful of streamers while at the same time subjecting the rest of the playerbase to a diminished gaming experience. All Blizzard had to do was follow their existing policy; OF had already decided to move on from HC.
Blizzard is breaking the cardinal rule of the internet by feeding the trolls. I don’t see how this can end other than how OP is predicting.
For the type of person to DDOS this is like accidentally winning the lottery. Harassing a streamer guild is fun, but it has nothing on puppeteering an entire gaming company.
There was DDOS during RWF as well; causing drama / chaos seems to be the goal if these DDOS are caused by the same actor. So no, the incentive only increases now.
I mean OP is technically correct, nobody will DDOS hardcore WoW if nobody is playing hardcore WoW because of the threat of losing hundreds of hours of work to a DDOS.
I don’t think you understand the type of person we’re talking about here. Repeatedly forcing Blizzard to roll servers back, while disrupting everyone’s gameplay and just generally causing chaos, is like the crack-kocaine of trolling.
They will string themselves out on this until Blizzard cuts the supply off by reverting to a non-response policy.
