Blizzard's Response to Classic Hardcore DDoS Attacks

Originally Posted by NineSpine

We get it: It's about you hating streamers, not any principal.

This assertion is incorrect and oversimplifies the issue at hand. The concern is rooted in Blizzard's inconsistency with their own rules—not any personal animosity toward streamers. The second paragraph of Blizzard's Hardcore mode agreement explicitly states:

"By agreeing to play on these realms, you accept that your character's death is permanent for whatever the reason. This includes disconnections, lag, server outages, gameplay bugs, or any other reason. Dying due to consensual PvP activity—such as a Duel to the Death or deliberately PvP flagging—is part of the game."

Originally Posted by Illuminance

Malicious actor DDoS forces a disconnect: you get a rez!
Blizzard's servers disconnect you/lag you out: tough luck!

Good luck proving the difference between you dying because of server lag/disconnect and you pulling your network cable or disconnecting your wifi.

Streamer priviledge, wow i'm SO shocked...

Y'all know that Anakin and Padme meme?

Anakin: "We're going to issue rollbacks due to the DDoS Attack"

Padme: "So Blizzard is going to rollback the people that lost characters to the DDoS during RWF too right?"

Anakin: "..."

Padme: "They're getting rolled back too... right...?"

Originally Posted by Ielenia

Good luck proving the difference between you dying because of server lag/disconnect and you pulling your network cable or disconnecting your wifi.

Lol read the 2nd paragraph of the agreement it states "This includes disconnections, lag, server outages, gameplay bugs, or any other reason."

Right there in black and white, there is no ambiguity in the wording when it states 'ANY OTHER REASON.' This serves as a blanket reason to cover unforeseen circumstances and reduces the need to list every possible scenario, which would be limitless and impractical for a typical user to read through.

Originally Posted by Ielenia

They didn't. It's one thing to die because your ISP disconnected you, or your power went out.

It's a completely different situation when a third party group shows up to grief those playing Hardcore with the intention of causing their characters to die.

You can take the stance that deaths should be reviewed and only player mistake/blunder counts toward the permanent death. But they have no real way to tell the difference between an incidental disconnect (ddos, power outage, packet loss, etc) and an intentional disconnect (alt f4, etc). The game is a buggy mess. You can fall through the terrain and die, you can take a flight path and it malfunction, etc. Either review the death, or review none of them. That's only fair.

Originally Posted by Hardstyle89

Lol read the 2nd paragraph of the agreement it states "This includes disconnections, lag, server outages, gameplay bugs, or any other reason."

Right there in black and white, there is no ambiguity in the wording when it states 'ANY OTHER REASON.' This serves as a blanket reason to cover unforeseen circumstances and reduces the need to list every possible scenario, which would be limitless and impractical for a typical user to read through.

What about my Hardcore char form diablo 2 that died on Friday June 30th 2000? at 10am CST? Will it be restored it was my 1st hard core diablo 2 character!!!

Originally Posted by Ielenia

Good luck proving the difference between you dying because of server lag/disconnect and you pulling your network cable or disconnecting your wifi.

Just like they can't tell if you disconnect due to ddos or otherwise.

Originally Posted by Ielenia

Good luck proving the difference between you dying because of server lag/disconnect and you pulling your network cable or disconnecting your wifi.

You don't think Blizzard keeps logs of the players' connectivity and latency? If they see some significant portion of their players all lag or disconnect at the same time, it's plainly obvious that it isn't just one player pulling their cable out of the wall.

The reason that Blizzard never corrects for those types of deaths is that (up until today) it is simply easier to have a blanket statement saying any death is permanent. It isn't about technical infeasibility, it's about 1) whether Blizzard wants to spend the resources to mitigate that problem and 2) whether they want to get embroiled in a constant debate over who should be spared or not.

The cat's out of the bag now that Blizzard is resurrecting hardcore players: if they are making exceptions for DDoS, it's worth considering the cases when the disconnects are Blizzard's responsibility, since the culpability of the player and the end result are the same.

Apparently some of the OF streamers who transferred their dead character to the other server are trying to get Blizzard to transfer them back to the HC server. I agree with the rollback but I don't think Blizzard should do the transfers.

Originally Posted by Hardstyle89

Lol read the 2nd paragraph of the agreement it states "This includes disconnections, lag, server outages, gameplay bugs, or any other reason."

Right there in black and white, there is no ambiguity in the wording when it states 'ANY OTHER REASON.' This serves as a blanket reason to cover unforeseen circumstances and reduces the need to list every possible scenario, which would be limitless and impractical for a typical user to read through.

I mean, you can take that stance, but mine is that, as it is with all ToS, the wording only applies to "you" and "them", as in, the player and Blizzard. A third party butting in and fucking up Blizzard's connections with DDoS attacks, the way I read this, is not included in there.

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Originally Posted by Azerothian Explorer

You can take the stance that deaths should be reviewed and only player mistake/blunder counts toward the permanent death. But they have no real way to tell the difference between an incidental disconnect (ddos, power outage, packet loss, etc) and an intentional disconnect (alt f4, etc). The game is a buggy mess. You can fall through the terrain and die, you can take a flight path and it malfunction, etc. Either review the death, or review none of them. That's only fair.

Originally Posted by Azerothian Explorer

Just like they can't tell if you disconnect due to ddos or otherwise.

True. But here's the difference: everyone, in both retail and classic, was getting disconnected due to the DDoS. Whereas in cases such as your connection fucking up or power going out in your neighborhood, only you are dropping out of the game.

Originally Posted by Sezerek

And the ddos only happened and affected everyone on that server because of the streamers, why should blizz let everyone suffer for this exactly?

Because they were perfectly fine letting us suffer when the servers crashed before.

Difference is no attentionfarmers cried about it.

Originally Posted by Hardstyle89

While Blizzard's decision to restore characters impacted by DDoS attacks might seem like a fair resolution, it undeniably contradicts their own user agreement for Hardcore realms. Here's the quoted agreement, specifically the second paragraph, in Blizzard's own words:

"By agreeing to play on these realms, you accept that your character's death is permanent for whatever the reason. This includes disconnections, lag, server outages, gameplay bugs, or any other reason. Dying due to consensual PvP activity—such as a Duel to the Death or deliberately PvP flagging—is part of the game."

This clearly states that all deaths, regardless of cause—including disconnections or external factors like DDoS attacks—are permanent. By backtracking on this principle, Blizzard undermines the very foundation of Hardcore gameplay that players willingly agreed to.

Furthermore, restoring characters sets a precedent that diminishes the Hardcore experience, where risk and accountability are integral parts of the mode. While addressing malicious actions like DDoS attacks is important, Blizzard's actions should stay consistent with the rules that all players accepted, preserving the integrity of the Hardcore mode and ensuring fairness across the board.

The argument that "there is zero break of the user agreement" ignores the explicit terms of the agreement, as quoted above. This decision represents a deviation from those terms, ultimately benefiting the malicious actors behind the attacks by forcing Blizzard to break their own policies.

You seem to not understand the difference between having no obligation to do something, versus promising to never do it.

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Originally Posted by Hardstyle89

This assertion is incorrect and oversimplifies the issue at hand. The concern is rooted in Blizzard's inconsistency with their own rules—not any personal animosity toward streamers. The second paragraph of Blizzard's Hardcore mode agreement explicitly states:

"By agreeing to play on these realms, you accept that your character's death is permanent for whatever the reason. This includes disconnections, lag, server outages, gameplay bugs, or any other reason. Dying due to consensual PvP activity—such as a Duel to the Death or deliberately PvP flagging—is part of the game."

It says that you "accept" that, not that Blizzard is obligated to never do it, nor that Blizzard is obligated to never update the rules.

Yall way to emotionally invested in this for some reason. Remember when Chromie said "But they lack vision. And a temporal discombobulator!" and rolled time back to crt monitors in 2019? Consider this rollback a canon.

Originally Posted by Illuminance

You don't think Blizzard keeps logs of the players' connectivity and latency? If they see some significant portion of their players all lag or disconnect at the same time, it's plainly obvious that it isn't just one player pulling their cable out of the wall.

Which is why they acted on this DDoS attack and offered to restore some of the dead characters.

The cat's out of the bag now that Blizzard is resurrecting hardcore players: if they are making exceptions for DDoS, it's worth considering the cases when the disconnects are Blizzard's responsibility, since the culpability of the player and the end result are the same.

Not really, because, as always, the resurrections are always up to Blizzard's decisions, not the player's. It's easy to assert your character died unfairly because of a DDoS attack if your character dies during a DDoS attack where everyone in both modern and classic WoW are getting lagged out of the game and disconnected.

Originally Posted by Dezolacer

Yall way to emotionally invested in this for some reason. Remember when Chromie said "But they lack vision. And a temporal discombobulator!" and rolled time back to crt monitors in 2019? Consider this rollback a canon.

I remember that, then Chromie disconnected because she was on Dial Up and her roommate picked up the phone to make a call

Originally Posted by NineSpine

None of this is how TCP/IP communication works. You are describing a fantasy technology that doesn't exist.

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I wish you guys would just be honest and say "I thought it was funny and now I'm big mad Blizzard is being decent to people!" Cloaking it in all this concern for consistency and integrity is laughable and transparent. You aren't fooling anyone.

The idea that Blizzard should take no action, thereby rewarding and encouraging more DDoS attacks against their servers, is absolutely fucking deranged.

What? You can easily log players pings and on top of that send external pings to monitor network external performance. It's just a matter of being efficient to not have a ton of storage overhead.

This discussion reminds me why I'll only play Hardcore mode on games that don't require an internet connection. Being at the whims of your ISP, server stability, DDOS attacks, etc. just makes the experience an exercise in frustration when you can't point to yourself as the cause of a death; can't really improve the next time or learn anything from dying due to all those factors out of your control beyond just not playing the game at all. And of course there's games nowadays that are single player but require online connectivity, so you can't just avoid multiplayer hardcore mode games either. In the end, I want to play games to waste my time on my own terms.

Thata so funny that its not hardcore. Knew blizz would cave for the streamer privilege. Pathetic lmao

Originally Posted by panda040

Streamer priviledge, wow i'm SO shocked...

So privileged they are the target of DDoS attacks that effect thousands of people, not just the steamers themselves.

It's so funny for people to cry privilege when it's harassment they have the privilege of being the target of.