New policy comes as OnlyFangs streaming guild planned to quit over DDOS disruptions.
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Not-so-permadeath: Blizzard revives Hardcore WoW characters killed by DDOS attacks
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A book I read once described it as "The quintessential joy of breaking things."
Some people are assholes. They derive literal actual joy by ruining the fun of other people. There are a variety of pathologies that can lead to that end result, none of which are exceptionally common, but when you add them all together you get between 1/4th and 1/3rd of the population who have some kind of itch in their brain to wreck shit for no other reason than that it'd be fun to do so.
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For me it is mostly about how far can I get, although my first and only hardcore character is in the 40s and still alive (sort of, I think I made a lv 10 bank alt to take care of some minor auction work and hold some stuff safely in the city.) I do not have enough time to raid (hardcore or not), but it is interesting leveling a character where I need to be cautious, and not treat death as a travel mechanism or temporary inconvenience if I push too hard.
I thought I would make it to maybe level 10, but it turns out I am decent at deciding what holes not to go into when there are even minor consequences. Losing it would be a lot of my gaming time, but I abandon saved games of other sorts often, and in reality it is fairly easy to level in such a way that you are not one mistake or misclick from death. It is not the hardest of hardcore games, especially if you know the game.
My wife basically ended the hardcore character by deciding it looked fun and wanting to play herself (but not hardcore, and she liked wotlk and especially cata, so that version of classic.) That is better in many ways, even if I lose characters there all the time too (mostly to taking a break for a while, then starting a different class or race.)
The less voluntary possible ending for a hardcore character has appeal to me (as someone who plays roguelikes), but it does not extend to their issues. If they suffer a drive failure I expect them to restore it from backups, and if they suffer a widespread DDOS, I expect they will revert deaths during the period they had no network communication.
Besides, even in the real world, how would you differentiate between a stable continuous universe, and the backups working well?
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I tend to find "hardcore" games to ironically be the opposite. Because the penalty for mistakes is so high I have to play ultra-conservatively and never take on a challenge that is anything but trivial. People who take risks in hardcore mode don't last very long. This is why roguelikes always have a hunger mechanic, because otherwise they could be beatable with just patience and not require a good dose of luck as well.
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I think it's more an expression of the Angry Short Guy (see Kendrick Lamar's halftime show for the AAA archetype). In the real world they eventually stop trying to challenge every big guy to a fight once their survival instinct outgrows their anger.
But in a video game, suddenly there's none of the immediate threats and intimidation and risks that happen in response to pushing peoples' boundaries in the real world. Suddenly they're as big and threatening as everyone else, and so they act the way they imagine anyone would act in that situation.
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1) griefing
2) extortion / trying to get a ransom
3) proof that the tool being used to DDoS works so that access to it can be sold for money
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"Without the threat of death there's no reason to live at all" -some Marilyn Manson song
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There are people like that in the game, however I would say the player base is opposite. Way to risky in a game with the consequences that it has.
98% of characters die before reaching max level and that was from a few years ago. With how popular the game has gotten recently because of the streamers I think new players have probably driven it north of 99%.
View: https://www.reddit.com/r/classicwow/comments/143f3q4/updated_hardcore_deathlog_stats_81000_deaths/
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"Contract law is highest law of the land, and code is law."
I dunno, that tracks precisely with most of the output of this guy.
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According to that most characters don't make it to level 15(!!).
That seems even more surprising to me since it's the low level content that tends to be the most boring in MMOs.
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You'd be surprised. I remember when I first started my first Hardcore run, back when hardcore was first released, and the beginner zones were a veritable graveyard. Corpses carpeting the land.
I always suspected that more than half of people were truly awful at the game. Pick-up-groups have always been a shitshow. The number of people who die in dungeons on hardcore is absurd; all you need is one idiot making one bad pull and 5 people suffer the consequences.
It's why my first hardcore character was a priest. If I didn't like how a dungeon run was going, I'd tell the party, in detail, why it was that I would not continue, then I'd leave the group and hearthstone out. Obviously not in the middle of a fight or anything; I wasn't looking to get anyone killed. But I sure as shit wasn't going to let them get me killed either.
And a Deadmines run with 5 level 18 characters should, at all times, be a cakewalk. If it is not a cakewalk, then the party is either too poorly equipped or too sloppy for me to risk it.
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I guess blizzard learned their lesson. Maybe they should take the permanent death away. Permanently because many want to play classic but won’t because of the permanent death. That’s why I will only play world of Warcraft classic seasons of discovery. With my character I made that I miss because I am on. A trip with family and couldn’t bring my laptop. Because there was no space. But when I get home at some point I’m going to play if my shoulder doesn’t hurt and burn on me.
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Permadeath can be a fun addition to a game, but can also be a pain in the damn ass.
Did a Solasta run in their ironman/single save game mode. On the way to the quest with the remorhaz and two baby remorhaz, I had an encounter with two full size remorhaz. During said encounter, one of the remorhaz some how clipped the terrain and managed to swallow someone way outside it's attack radius. The result of that clipping bug was one character survived the encounter with just a few hp left. Needless to say, I haven't run another single save game in Solasta.
Did a Solasta run in their ironman/single save game mode. On the way to the quest with the remorhaz and two baby remorhaz, I had an encounter with two full size remorhaz. During said encounter, one of the remorhaz some how clipped the terrain and managed to swallow someone way outside it's attack radius. The result of that clipping bug was one character survived the encounter with just a few hp left. Needless to say, I haven't run another single save game in Solasta.
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You seem to be under a misapprehension; In the "Classic Era" servers, there are 10 normal servers and one RP server that are not hardcore, and a whole bunch of PvP servers; there are only two hardcore servers. Under the "Anniversary" servers, there is one normal, one hardcore, and two PvP servers.
It's true that Seasons of Discovery has no hardcore servers, but that does not mean that all of the other Classic servers are hardcore; most of them are not.
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That's the issue, because it's easy and boring (you're pressing one button, zero if you're a Paladin), you're more inclined to take risks to speed it up. The fact there's not 40-50 hours of catching up to do if you die at that point too also helps justify it.
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Also War Thunder and World of Tanks/Warships/Whatever with their game balance arguments far too often devolving to idiots divulging classified information, no matter how many times the developers say that they WON'T use it and bans anyone who posts it, sometimes also reporting it to national police.
Admittedly, that's just one insane thing repeated ad nauseum.
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You're not wrong, but still it IS a game and it IS twitch streaming, so yep, it IS theater.
I appreciated the poetry of your post though and your adherence to a definite set of principles
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Yeah, but simultaneously you are very fragile. Few hits and you are dead. Additionally, all these games start essentially the same - a bit different graphics for different start areas, but both your character and mobs lack skills/powers/... so on your n-th playthrough it is fairly boring bashing of skulls until you reach some higher level. Add lack of punishment (you lose a day of playing instead of a month) and you rush through the early game. Finally, add all the people that want to just try the HC game for the first time but aren't used to "not-dying" - they also significantly increase number of early character deaths.
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I don't understand, but then again I've never played a real MMO, only Minecraft. I'd have thought that if you get disconnected / DDOSed, your character would just disappear from the world until you log back in, not stay there as a sitting duck?
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I will probably be downvoted a lot for saying this, but I don't get why people watch streams of MMOs. This has to be the most boring kind of game to watch live, since the genre is all about making big numbers bigger via clunky and repetitive gameplay.
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When you send the server a disconnect request by logging off, sure. When it's unceremonious and you didn't ask to be disconnected, it keeps you there. The game has no idea you're gone because as far as it's aware it's still waiting to receive input from you, it looks no different to if you just walked away from the keyboard. It's not great for situations like this but it's a much more optimised way to handle an unexpected disconnection than constantly pinging for every user's connection to make sure they haven't been dropped.
ETA: Not that the server never checks to see if you're disconnected, but it's much less frequent than you might be expecting. Odds are high that you'd still be logged in for probably 30 seconds or so, which is long enough to die without input if you're in combat in WoW.
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It's not my bag either, but each to their own.
However, a while ago I was sharing a house with some friends, all of whom played WoW in the same guild. So on raid nights, I'd often be sat in the living room watching one of them play, whilst listening to the others on comms.
I'd recommend watching a really tight group doing a raid at least once. Just to appreciate the teamwork and skills that go into it. I was living with these guys, so I knew how a simple request like "could you grab some milk from the shops" would dissolve into a shouting argument, and yet their GM could somehow get 15-20 squirely geeks all pointed in the same direction and cooperating. It was really amazing to watch.
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Even an explicit logoff is only instant if you are in a city or other safe area, otherwise it starts a timer you must wait out before logoff, or at least your character remains in the world and vulnerable for that time even if you choose to exit immediately.
I believe the idea is to prevent you from pulling the cord from the wall to avoid a death.
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I would bet real money this is one of PirateSoftware's dick riders behind the ddos'ing after he got booted from OnlyFangs.
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Calling other people "dick riders" when you're still bringing up months old drama that everyone moved on from is certainly a bold move. That entire thing was already blown out of proportion online for days or even weeks beyond what it should have been as it was.
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This is one of those rare threads where 'I don't like hardcore/ironman modes and think it's a developer waste of resources to offer them in any capacity even on a specific server with warning signs' is better off not posted at all.
That's because whether people like roguelikes or permadeath is not the topic of the discussion at all, it's a derailment, a distraction, a troll, not just an opinion.
Such people need to be moved along, by forum rules if necessary, because the focus of the topic at hand is the DDOS, Blizzard or OnlyFangs, not your general feelings on MMOs or hardcore gameplay.
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@Aurich, @webmaster : Please note that the video embeds in this article (presumably from Twitch?) completely break the page on mobile. They do not resize to fit the column width and get monstrously wide instead, which subsequently messes with pinch-zooming. That never happens with YouTube embeds, for example.
More on the topic -- it's an interesting statistic that of all the DDoS attacks happening around the Internet, the largest by far (the biggest and most record-breaking) happen against game servers, or other companies in the "gaming" vertical.
They're also some of the hardest DDoS types to protect against -- given that game traffic is pretty much un-cacheable (the standard form of protection for regular websites) and that it mostly goes over UDP instead of TCP for latency reasons. Legitimate game packets also tend to be small, with not much to go for when deciding good vs. bad. That all means that instead of filtering the nasty traffic at the Edge, which is normally done for 99% of attacks, companies like Blizzard here need to use data-centre level protections that route traffic through so-called "scrubbing centres" instead. These are both expensive and reactive protections (i.e. the traffic needs to be specifically routed that way) with human operators constantly monitoring, thus their talk of "response time" in the article; that doesn't come cheap.
It's actully a tricky and fascinating technical effort going on behind the scenes to protect against such a DDoS attack, sometimes more epic than the game battles themselves
it'd be worth an article!
More on the topic -- it's an interesting statistic that of all the DDoS attacks happening around the Internet, the largest by far (the biggest and most record-breaking) happen against game servers, or other companies in the "gaming" vertical.
They're also some of the hardest DDoS types to protect against -- given that game traffic is pretty much un-cacheable (the standard form of protection for regular websites) and that it mostly goes over UDP instead of TCP for latency reasons. Legitimate game packets also tend to be small, with not much to go for when deciding good vs. bad. That all means that instead of filtering the nasty traffic at the Edge, which is normally done for 99% of attacks, companies like Blizzard here need to use data-centre level protections that route traffic through so-called "scrubbing centres" instead. These are both expensive and reactive protections (i.e. the traffic needs to be specifically routed that way) with human operators constantly monitoring, thus their talk of "response time" in the article; that doesn't come cheap.
It's actully a tricky and fascinating technical effort going on behind the scenes to protect against such a DDoS attack, sometimes more epic than the game battles themselves
it'd be worth an article!
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I am in a random leveling guild and there are many players that have no chance of hitting level 40, but they keep trying.
There are some people on their 5th-10th+ attempt. These are 18-25 year olds and I think many of them play inebriated late at night.
I have tons of bags on my bank alt to mail to these people when they "Go Agane!"
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I was wondering, since the videos are in Blackwing Lair, how one gets through Vaelastrasz without randomly losing some characters to Burning Adrenaline.
Burning Adrenaline is a debuff placed on a random player every 15 seconds, and after 20 seconds that player dies and explodes; you can't cleanse this debuff. It also makes your spellcasts instant, which is important.
I recall back in the day you could use that instant cast to hearthstone out to your home inn and explode everyone around you randomly. Turns out Blizzard thought about this, and at some point between then and now, your debuffs are cleansed when you hearthstone out of a raid. This avoids griefing players in cities with the explosion, and also prevents people from randomly having their characters removed from Hardcore due to that boss mechanic.
Burning Adrenaline is a debuff placed on a random player every 15 seconds, and after 20 seconds that player dies and explodes; you can't cleanse this debuff. It also makes your spellcasts instant, which is important.
I recall back in the day you could use that instant cast to hearthstone out to your home inn and explode everyone around you randomly. Turns out Blizzard thought about this, and at some point between then and now, your debuffs are cleansed when you hearthstone out of a raid. This avoids griefing players in cities with the explosion, and also prevents people from randomly having their characters removed from Hardcore due to that boss mechanic.
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Flask of petrification and hearth.
Once you hit 50 you have a macro set that saves your life at a cost of 40g.
Many people still die with this option. Lots of things can kill you faster than you think.
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An interesting, but surprising, concession--I think it would be interesting/good for Blizzard to have a "permadeath" server that is identical in policy to the "hardcore", except on death you can't transfer it to another server.
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It has probably been ten years or so since I played WOW. Looking at these videos surprises me in that it looks exactly the same. No improvements in the graphics after this long? I moved onto ESO and the world is just as massive, and looks so much better. The tech they are talking about here is not the only thing that needs improvement.
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This is Classic, which is why it literally looks the same. Granted current WoW is still pretty dated looking, but they did make some improvements over the expansions.
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They did do one massive jump in tech and graphics I think in... cataclysm? But that might have been before you played.
That said...why would they increase the graphics exactly? Very few dedicated players are asking for it, and doing that risks losing a not insignificant portion of their subscribers who have computers too old to run more modern games. Increased fidelity also means increased production costs when creating assets.
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More people, more demands from law enforcement and just spend more on infrastructure!
Cheap bastards, always unable to login for ages when a new game/expansion launches!!!
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