Then maybe they need to come up with a better work around for this if its constantly happening. Have the race to world first competitors on their own set of servers separate from the rest of the game so that people that are doing that don’t bother to screw all of the regular players over. Its not fair for the rest of the players that this is just accepted and chalked up as “hua hua hua its race to world first time its to be expected” nahhhh do something about it to avoid this from happening.
We all do, I have guildies who are in game right now waiting for me to log in to craft them new items before our raid tonight were we got a free spark splinter today.
That won’t do anything. It’s affecting authentication servers not game servers preventing logging in.
And again extending bandwidth is uneconomical because DDOS attacks happen rarely outside of Race to World First Events and when RMT sellers get angry at a Ban Wave.
Costs for bandwidth increase exponentially based on how much you need. It’s economical for Steam because they can have 300+ million people online.
For Blizzard NA we need significantly less.
By its very nature, it is impossible to prevent a DDoS attack before it actually begins. Blizzard could end up blocking legitimate IP addresses.
Mitigation refers to reducing the impact of a DDoS attack when one is actively happening. Mitigation does not mean preventing it in the first place. As I said before, that would be impossible.
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This isn’t just a WoW issue. It occurred on OW, too. Along with Blizz Support articles & the Mobile Blizz App, as well.
Agreed we’ve had multiple long-term downtimes in the past month. Many lasting for several hours and one even all day long.
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Guess its time to drop blizzard games then, I haven’t had this issue with any other game or game launcher that I have ever played or used in my entire life. But with blizzard it seems to happen all the time.
Guess so. I actually haven’t paid Blizz any money (in awhile) because I have my own issues with them. I use their free services, though. I understand your frustration, but it’s not gonna make this fixed any faster.
Yes there is another MMO that I play that has had constant DDOS attacks, it’s not just directed at Blizzard but with the RWF and new patch content - and the “issue” with those exploiters this may very well be why this issue is happening.
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tl;dr: this is just me riffing on reliability engineering and cloud computing concepts while WoW is down. Feel free to skip.
I doubt any of the people who worked there 20+ years ago are still there, but all the DDoS mitigation that was learned 5 years ago (and 5 years before, and 5 years before that) has changed. Different threats require different solutions and industry movements come with new advantages and disadvantages.
When WoW was launched, there was no such thing as a cloud datacenter. Blizzard owned and operated their own server farms in leased/co-located datacenters around the world. When a new server needed to be deployed, they’d have to build and configure it and have it installed and put online. Now, companies like Microsoft (Azure) or Amazon (AWS) handle all the hardware and just give their datacenter customers API access to have software-defined servers automatically built, deployed, and scaled out. This has SO MANY advantages, but comes with new security disadvantages.
Why not leave it the old way forever, since they have it figured out? Three big reasons: 1 = cost. It’s more expensive to manage your own hardware and hard infrastructure and to hire and pay the people to maintain it. 2 = Expertise. As developers and deployment engineers and reliability engineers change with the industry, it’s harder to find people who only want to work on “the old ways of doing things.” 3 = Changing laws and partner agreements. GDPR, CCPA, and other privacy-focused regulations have specific data handling requirements that require adapting methods. Billing providers constantly change and increase security levels for payment handling. Different countries have different requirements for what can be included in the game. Microsoft now owns ATVI/Blizz, which means they have their mandate that Blizz must move to (if they aren’t already on) Azure hosted cloud solutions. I worked at a company that was bought by MSFT, so I know that the migration to Azure was mandatory even if slow.
Things keep changing, and DDoS mitigation needs to keep evolving. Security experts often don’t know of a DDoS vulnerability until someone attacks with it.
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Their own BNet launcher is hardly a “right wing propaganda platform” which is where I found out about it. Plus, these forums.
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Same, servers are cooked, apparently.
They have, Vrakthris has communicated it to us in this very thread and the BNet launcher has as well.
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You’re kidding right? Let’s do the math, a $15 sub per month works out to be about $0.021 per hour (720 hours in 30 days). So even if WoW was down for 1 hour per day every day (for a total of 30 hours), it would be $0.63 that Blizzard would owe you.
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HEY!!! WHAT GOING ON i PLAYING AND i CNNOT LOG BACK ON !!!
There’s an DDoS attack going right now.
Just for transparency, the current issue does NOT look to be a DDoS attack last we heard.
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Theyd lose their customers if it was the exact hour someone was able to play every day. Just because its “only one hour” doesnt mean people have the availability to play for all of the other 23 hours in the day. This exact specific time could be the only time someone can play in the day.
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That’s not a Blizzard problem though. The game is never touted or advertised as being available to play 24/7.
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Blizzard would do such after its done and if it’s warranted. In the end, it’s Blizzard’s called in the end and their alone.
Let us in! The citizens of Azeroth need to quest!
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