14 DAY TRIAL // The development team at Blizzard has launched the new Warlords of Draenor expansion for World of Warcraft this week and it seems that the first few days of playtime for most gamers offered a suboptimal experience which is being blamed on Denial of Service attacks coming from malicious groups.
The information is delivered via the official forums of the game, where Micah Whiple, best known to the community under the name Bashiok, explains that the attacks were hard to deal with because the company was already focused on eliminating the problems that are generally associated with such big content releases.
He adds, “We know that the experience has been less than ideal as we approach our first full day of launch. We ran into a few other issues, including a distributed denial of service attack, that resulted in increased latency.”
In order to try and limit the impact of the denial of service attacks, the company has already brought down the North American servers of the MMO and might do the same again in the coming days.
At the same time, Blizzard is dealing with the issues by lowering the maximum population for all realms in World of Warcraft, which does mean that the player community will have to accept that the length of queues might remain above average for a while.
Warlords of Draenor is important for the future of World of Warcraft
World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor is the fifth full expansion for the MMO, designed to introduce a big new area for gamers to explore and a lot of content aimed at those who have already managed to reach level 90.
The company hopes that the release will bring back some of the gamers who have abandoned the title in the last few years and convince them to commit to the experience again in the long term.
World of Warcraft remains a subscription-based MMO, and a very successful one, at a time when other titles in the same genre are opting to use free-to-play and microtransactions.
Blizzard has suggested that it will wait for a while before deploying a full first patch for Warlords of Draenor in order to make sure that it has a clear view of the issues affecting the community.
The company might also shift some resources that were linked to World of Warcraft to its new Overwatch team-based shooter, which sources are saying that it’s based in part on the canceled Titan.
UPDATE: Blizzard announces that slight improvements have been made during the day and that it is continuing to work to eliminate all Warlords of Draenor problems.
The official site adds, "Our current biggest hurdle is the concentration of players in specific areas and zones, and an unexpected effect of that concentration on the realm stability. We’re continuing to maintain a lowered realm population cap to help with the stability, which is resulting in increased queue times."
