Blizzard seem to have a penchant for grossly underestimating the size of their fanbase, and the latest example of this has taken place during the developer’s launch of the latest World of Warcraft expansion, Warlords of Draenor.
According to forum posts by Blizzard community manager Bashiok, Europe, which was first in line to launch Warlords of Draenor, experienced significant latency issues as an overwhelming number of players attempted to access the expansion content all at once. The problems included:
Instance servers timing out, which may impact dungeon access
Continent server issues, which are resulting in Player Not Found and disconnection issues
Garrison server issues, which are resulting in phasing and performance issues
Blizzard worked to create more avenues to entire Draenor through, and this proved to alleviate some of the problems, but a distributed denial of service attack across the servers still presented plenty of problems. A curious image from WoW Insider showing the origins of the DDOS attacks pretty much paints China, rather unsurprisingly, as the obvious culprit:
After going through hell and back to fix the issues, Blizzard shut down the North American servers for maintenance before bringing them back online the following morning, although they have scheduled further maintenance to take place tomorrow at 3 pm PST for the US and 5 am CET for Europe. You can keep up with these updates here.
The fifth expansion pack for the long running MMORPG, Warlords of Draenor was announced at BlizzCon 2013 and released last Thursday, on November 13. Aside from the obligatory new quests and environments, the expansion raises the level up up to 100 from the previous 90 and introduces an even tougher raid difficulty level, called Mythic.