Have you ever been ranked in a game before? Maybe you got the best score in Pacman and had your initals recorded by your local arcade, but now it seems multiplayer gaming has really, really changed.
Xbox 360 user and Black Ops 2 player "Retrominano" found out how different things are today in a very bad way. You see, he was formerly the number one ranked Black Ops 2 player on the Xbox 360; but after getting repeated Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks that prevented him from getting online, he just resetted his stats to make it stop.
Just what is a DDOS attack? Here's what Wikipedia has to say:
In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) or distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) is an attempt to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users. Although the means to carry out, motives for, and targets of a DoS attack may vary, it generally consists of the efforts of one or more people to temporarily or indefinitely interrupt or suspend services of a host connected to the Internet."
Here's his public message to a friend over on the PC where he states he can only connect on Xbox LIVE for 10-minutes per day due to someone in the U.S. "DDOSing" him.
Based on the Reddit post where this originated, it seems Retrominano resetted his IP multiple times but it didn't work. His public game sessions were also "joined" by people harrassing him, too. So this left him no choice but to do one thing…and that's to reset/wipe his stats.
Yep, the Xbox 360's global number one ranked Black Ops 2 player had to reset his stats to avoid online attacks, he even took an image of him being back on level one just to prove it.
I haven't played or seen Retrominano online, but based on comments, he seems to have gotten his number one ranking legitimately. If so, this is such an ass move by those attackers. Have Call of Duty players stooped this low that they'll harass people that are better/ranked higher than them?
Hopefully, Treyarch and Activision does a better job of policing their game so things like these will be a thing of the past.
Have you played with Retrominano online? Also, what do you think of people attacking him for simply being ranked the number one player on the Xbox 360? How should Treyarch or Activision solve these kinds of issues?
