Many fans of World of Warcraft are currently frustrated. It lags and there are connection drops. People are demanding free playtime – but that is rather unlikely.
If you look at the US realms of World of Warcraft right now, there has been a lot of frustration for a while. Because large lags and repeated connection drops are currently the norm there. The problems are so severe that the guild “OnlyFangs” from WoW Hardcore has already been forced to give up – the project has been declared finished.
Due to the outages, many are now looking for compensation and mention that the “old Blizzard” always provided free playtime during server outages.
Which servers are affected? Mainly, the attacks concern the US realms. Due to the structure, an attack affects the servers of all WoW versions – meaning both The War Within as well as Classic and Season of Discovery. Players have been suffering from lags and connection drops here for days, which can have deadly consequences, especially on the hardcore realms – namely the permanent loss of a character.
What is the community demanding? In the WoW subreddit, several posts are making the rounds, requesting compensation from Blizzard. Especially a listing of playtime from the year 2005 – the early days of World of Warcraft – should show how often WoW simply distributed one or two days of free compensation to everyone when the server maintenance didn’t run smoothly:
The saying “Never play on patch day” originates from this time, because back then the game was often only playable in a limited way or not at all for the entire day.
The demand: Blizzard should also distribute free playtime again now.
Why isn’t Blizzard doing this now? There are several reasons for that. On the one hand, Blizzard has been much stingier in recent years when it comes to free playtime or “compensations”. On the other hand, this is also a completely different incident.
In the past, Blizzard was responsible for the long outages themselves – maintenance took longer, a patch was faulty during installation, or similar issues. Such occurrences have become significantly rarer.
The current incident clearly comes from the outside and Blizzard can do little to counter it. DDoS attacks are (comparatively) easy to carry out and hard to block, even tech giants like Microsoft occasionally buckle for several hours.
At the same time, it would also send a strange signal if Blizzard compensated for the incidents with free playtime now. Because then there would essentially be a “reward” for the DDoS attacks, which could only be an additional incentive in the future to “force” even more free play days for all players.
