World of Warcraft keeps suffering from huge DDOS attacks, and it’s time to actually protect hardcore players

Despite it’s age, World of Warcraft and World of Warcraft Classic are both some of the biggest MMORPGs around. Since the OG game’s launch in late 2004, Blizzard’s MMO continues to maintain millions of players with some engaging in brand-new content like Undermine while others replay old adventures.

However, in recent months, Blizzard’s MMORPG has been attacked almost constantly with the latest attack happening just hours ago at the time of writing. DDOS attacks—Direct Denial of Service attacks—are continuing to hammer Blizzard’s servers, and there appears to be no sign of stopping.

Just a few weeks ago, the massive World of Warcraft Classic Hardcore guild OnlyFangs almost shut down in its entirety due to targeted DDOS attacks on the guild. As the guild was arranging treacherous raid fights, hackers started hammering the game’s servers to ruin their fun. As we all know, death in hardcore means death for good, and losing your character because someone else decided to be the MMO’s lamest supervillain isn’t fun.

Following the loss of the massive guild, Blizzard community manager Kaivax revealed the studio was “taking steps to resurrect player-characters that were lost” as a result of those DDOS attacks. The studio also explained that it plans to “revive Hardcore characters that perish in a mass event which we deem inconsistent with the integrity of the game”.

However, for a hardcore player, there’s no guarantee that World of Warcraft will revert anything, and I think some form of guarantee needs to be made known during these attacks. With DDOSing now more prominent than ever in WoW, a failsafe period needs to be added, and Blizzard should have some form of service that tells players when this failsafe is active.

It’s all well and good when Blizzard pops on social media that a DDOS attack is occurring, but with millions of players (many of whom are leaving Twitter for good reason), there needs to be better knowledge of when hardcore players are unsafe. It’s annoying dying in normal WoW, but losing everything because of an attack is the most upsetting it can get in WoW. (Hey, Diablo as well!)

I don’t know how Blizzard could implement this at all—I’m not a game developer. (Although, I do have some very interesting chats with them on the VideoGamer Podcast. I suggest this episode with Diablo creator David Brevik!) However, I do think players who invest thousands of hours into World of Warcraft should be protected, and know when they’re protected as well.