After DDOS attacks, Blizzard rolls back Hardcore WoW deaths for the first time

“I don’t feel comfortable dragging people through getting world buffs, flasks, and consumes etc., just to raid with the anxiety and probably the actuality of just being DDOS’d again and dying,” sodapoppin wrote.

Blizzard to the rescue?

Sodapoppin allowed that OnlyFangs might continue “if we get a rollback [of the DDOS-related deaths] or I hear of some solid… DDOS protection” but added that they “don’t see that happening.” Last night, though, Blizzard surpassed sodapoppin’s expectations and changed its Classic Hardcore permadeath policy to specifically deal with situations like this.

“Recently, we have experienced unprecedented distributed-denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks that impacted many Blizzard game services, including Hardcore realms, with the singular goal of disrupting players’ experiences,” WoW Classic Associate Production Director Clay Stone wrote in a public message. “As we continue our work to further strengthen the resilience of WoW realms and our rapid response time, we’re taking steps to resurrect player-characters that were lost as a result of these attacks.”

While Blizzard’s general policy on Hardcore mode deaths hasn’t changed, Stone writes that the recent deaths due to DDOS are different because they “are an intentionally malicious effort made by third-party bad actors, and we believe the severity and results of DDOS attacks specifically warrant a different response.”

That’s not entirely out of step with Blizzard’s longstanding Hardcore Mode policies, which specifically prohibit “deliberate action to hamper or significantly impede the ability of other players to enjoy the game” or “actions to deliberately cause the death of another player.” But those policies were designed to punish various forms of in-game griefing, not for an anonymous botnet attacking the game servers themselves.

Now that DDOS-related deaths are no longer permanent, the griefers responsible for those attacks will hopefully have less motivation to take out all of Battle.net just to impact one WoW raid. But the appeal of disrupting specific scheduled streams will remain until Blizzard can find some way to protect its servers more effectively.