The road to Overwatch 2 has not been an easy one. Many would argue that the road to its launch was fun of controversial decisions they’re still paying for currently. One is the decision to move all new players to new servers. While it’s not unheard of for this to happen with sequels to online games, this one felt different overall because the base game is still there; it’s just going free-to-play. They already had the servers ready to go. Many think they could’ve just augmented specific programming, made the game free-to-play, and did an expansion patch to loop in the new content. Because they didn’t do something to that effect, they’re dealing with a cascading situation right now.
Not too long ago, the Overwatch 2 servers launched. The OG servers were shut down the other day, and there was a slight lull in games as the old servers shut off and the new servers were brought online. However, once the new servers got brought online, they were immediately overloaded on two fronts. First, the new game and free-to-play model brought many gamers to the servers. There were queue lines up to 40,000 people long! While the game was expected to have massive traffic, the original title had millions of players, and the queue lines should’ve never gotten that long.
So what happened? As revealed by Blizzard President Mike Ybarra, the servers suffered a DDoS Attack, and now Blizzard’s team is trying to fix it ASAP.
A DDoS Attack is when a singular person causes the servers to overload. They become full of traffic in a non-natural way, and the requests on the server overload their capabilities. As a result, they are causing massive queue lines and players not getting a chance to play the game, among other things.
On the one hand, Blizzard has had to deal with attacks like this in the past, so they will be able to work it out. On the other hand, this is not how they wanted to start the launch of Overwatch 2. The game is one of their biggest releases this fall and was meant to be a momentous occasion. Blizzard even asked gamers to share their favorite memories of the original game to help set the mood for the dawn of the new game. Now that mood is wrecked because of the attacks and lack of server function.
Sadly, this is one of many issues facing the sequel title, including how Blizzard asks gamers to grind to get all the characters unless they pay for them. Or how they’ve removed the leveling system or the change to 5v5 gameplay.
Will the game overcome these issues? More than likely thanks to the diehard fanbase. But Blizzard isn’t making it easy on them.
Source: Twitter
