New expansion World of Warcraft: Legion launches without incident, until a DDoS attack against Blizzard's network causes issues for some of the game's players.

Nowadays it wouldn't be a big launch without a group of party poopers trying to spoil everyone's good time. World of Warcraft: Legion, the game's latest expansion, released yesterday and many players were forced to endure denial-of service (DDoS) attacks while trying to experience it. Blizzard notified players through Twitter and its Battle.net client that the game was dealing with an attack.

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A DDoS attack will cause high latency and generally slow everything down, causing pretty much everything to be out of sync due to significant delays. Disconnections are not uncommon - if a player is actually able to log on, that is.

In cases such as this, various groups often claim responsibility under the guise of some noble purpose. As such, it's always hard to pin down who is behind such attacks, since a great deal of hacker groups flock to Twitter during events to claim responsibility for the action. Often, excuses are then given that relate to merely exposing a network's security issues; insinuating victims should be grateful somehow. Because a DDoS attack like this one is fairly simple to do, hacker groups seem to relish at the chance to easily and efficiently cause grief to others.

Luckily, there are various reports from the community that say they did not even notice the attack. Many claimed to have played without incident - only dealing with slight delays, but nothing significant. This is good news for people tired of this trend in DDoS attacks, which can be assumed to include most people simply trying to play the game which has been targeted.

Now that the attacks are over, they are not likely to return anytime soon, as groups in charge of these attacks enjoy targeting high profile launches to get the most attention. As an example, the last time this happened to World of Warcraft was the launch of its last expansion, Warlords of Draenor. Now that the Legion launch is over, the groups in question will most likely move on. Players can now safely enter this new expansion with no hassle and enjoy the copious, exciting new content available. Game Rant even has some tips to help new players get started.

So far, minus outside influences, the expansion has been received quite well. That hasn't stopped Blizzard from announcing future content early to keep energy high, however. The company has already revealed the expansion's first update: Return to Karazhan. The update will bring players back to a reimagined version of a popular raid from back in the day.

While DDoS attacks show no sign of stopping, they are few and far between and not a daily occurrence, which is no doubt a relief to players. For now, World of Warcraft: Legion is good to go.

Source: VentureBeat