It’s not uncommon for newly released MMO games to suffer various technical hiccups on launch day but the problems that arise on such a day are not typically attributed to damaging attacks from an outside source. With hours of the launch of the highly anticipated World of Warcraft expansion, Warlords of Draenor, Blizzard took to the official forums to respond to player concerns and complaints surrounding the technical stability and availability of the servers.
In a forum post published earlier today Blizzard confirmed that the World of Warcraft servers did indeed suffer a distributed denial of service attack (DDOS) that was a direct cause of the problems players were experiencing with large queues, unreliable connections and sporadic lag spikes.
[quote cite=”Bashiok, Community Manager “]We’re excited to finally launch Warlords of Draenor and explore this new world with you, but we know that the experience has been less than ideal as we approach our first full day of launch.
Europe was our first region to launch, and we encountered a few issues due to the sheer number of players attempting to enter Draenor from a single location. We worked to add multiple new ways to access Draenor, and this helped ease some of the initial rush into the new expansion as players were able to access it from their capital cities, as well as from the shrines in Pandaria.
While that solution helped a ton for our North American launch, we ran into a few other issues, including a distributed denial of service attack, that resulted in increased latency.
To help correct for this and other issues, we’ve temporarily lowered maximum realm populations. This means there will be high queue times experienced on high-population realms.
[/quote]
The post also goes on to explain other problems that the developers consider high priority including Garrison server problems resulting in phasing and performance problems, Player Not Found issues, and the timing out of instances.
Source: Official Forums