Diablo 4 saw two instances of DDOS attacks over the last weekend.
There’s no doubt that Diablo 4 has been Blizzard’s most successful game to date. In fact, Blizzard revealed that it is the fastest selling title in the company’s history. We covered the game’s strong critical acclaim. It has even been out long enough that there are quite a few people who have finished the main story campaign.
That success and popularity definitely translates to millions of people still playing the game. Even those players who finished the story are likely still coming back and checking out the unlocked content and the endgame campaigns.
So it’s a big deal that Blizzard got hit by a DDOS attack, adversely affecting all those players. The first attack happened in June 25, causing issues with logging in. As reported by Kotaku, Blizzard shared this message during the duration of that issue:
“We are investigating the login issues affecting Diablo IV and working to resolve these as soon as possible. Players may experience queues while we work on the issue.”
Blizzard later clarified that the login issues were due to a DDOS attack.
Blizzard informed their players of another such attack occurring Sunday afternoon as well. As they tweeted out on the official Blizzard customer service account:
“We are currently experiencing a DDoS attack, which may result in high latency and disconnections for some players. We are actively working to mitigate this issue.”
On the side, there’s another reason that these outages are quite bad for Diablo players, and it’s something that augurs poorly for other similar games as well.
Diablo 4, if you still don’t know, has a live service aspect, a controversial choice for reasons that you will see below.
While online only games have existed for decades now, live service is a platform that makes players reliant that they stay online to avail of such services. Without those services, players will be complaining about losing their progress or character, or some other data to some leve or degree.
This is particularly painful for players playing on hardcore mode. Diablo 4’s hardcore mode will end your game completely if your character dies, and so if you were a player who happened to be playing during a DDOS attack, you are already starting over.
It’s not clear if Blizzard has a solution for this particular situation, but it’s definitely something that will inform their development of future games. Hopefully they can tweak the game so that you can get one free reload of your character back for these situations.
