This is an editorial; an opinion piece by a member of WoW Insider's staff.

The last 36 hours have not been kind to Blizzard. They've encountered a number of problems at all levels of their technical and gameplay infrastructure. In the grand books of game launches, this isn't how they, or anyone, would want things to go -- it's been the opposite of smooth and reliable. While it's hard to say if the worst is over (although I'll say it anyway), what we do know is Blizzard has been working nonstop to fix every problem.

Yesterday the server engineers didn't go home. The community managers didn't leave. Developers were cranking out hotfixes at seven o'clock in the evening. From my vantage point as an observer of this company, they were firing on all cylinders well after the close of business. Was it enough? No, not by a long shot.

But let's clear a few things up. Blizzard has their share of responsibility for what happened, but they also are not responsible for the idiocy of the criminal behavior of the DDoS attack.

What Blizzard Is Responsible For

Blizzard makes the game, they make the systems in the game, they decide the quest flow, the entrance points to Draenor, etc... Let's make a non-exhaustive list of everything Blizzard is responsible for, which will help illustrate things a bit better:

• Quest bottlenecks, where you need one mob and only one person can get credit for it at a time
• Broken terrain and areas that just don't work
• Forcing the entire server to congregate at one or two spots
• The toy train, mammoth mounts, and other annoying in-game items that ruin the experience for players

So basically, Blizzard is responsible for everything that comes into play after you log into WoW. Leads us nicely to our second point...

What Blizzard Is Not Responsible For

Again, we'll take the bullet point list to help illustrate:

• Script kiddies (people who think they're hackers but are really not) launching Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against their servers.

That's a pretty short list, right? But it's still an important list, and on that is pretty confusing. So let's talk about DDoS attacks for a minute.

DDoS attacks are where millions of computers across diverse geographic locations start calling a server; in this case all those millions of computers called up the servers running Warlords of Draenor. Blizzard servers recognized this right away, and started hanging up on all the false calls. But there are so many of them that Blizzard's servers can't keep up and things slow down across the board.

All the sudden we see in-game latency issues; the servers are just not able to respond fast enough to events in- and out-of-game. We see disconnects when people are in-game, we see weird things happen like running around the map for a minute, only to be magically transported back to the start of a zone. All of that is happening because Blizzard's servers are trying hard to keep up and deal with the denial of service attacks, but they can't.

Then, Blizzard has to implement even stricter rules. They have to reduce server capacity in hopes that it will allow the servers to keep up with players who are in-game better. They have to change the way their servers work a little bit, but that messes other things up. And all these changes can't really be tested the way a normal patch or server change would be tested -- they're rolled out live to millions of players quickly with little quality control, in hopes that players will just be able to log in and enjoy the game. This is the right decision on Blizzard's part, but still, it just causes more issues.

All last night Blizzard was communicating this. They were being honest and up front. And it's important to remember here that they have to be honest. If they start to lie about their problems, particularly with things based in facts, like a DDoS attack, then they'll anger their investors and get in trouble with the SEC. You can't lie to your investors, ever -- it's against the law. If you do, you don't get to be a public company like Activision-Blizzard is.

I hope this helps clears up some facts about the issues. There were a lot of people claiming this is some big conspiracy and what not. Yes, Blizzard is certainly responsible for some of the mess, and their folks are working non-stop to fix them. But at the same time, Blizzard cannot be held responsible for the craven activities of script kiddies and criminal elements that carry out massive DDoS attacks.

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion