It was a pretty annoying weekend to be playing some of Blizzard’s titles — in particular, World of Warcraft Classic. Players noticed significant disruptions, lag, and loss of services due to a barrage of DDoS attacks on Saturday and Sunday.
“Today, Saturday, September 7, the World of Warcraft service has been negatively impacted by an ongoing distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack,” the studio posted on the forums. “For several hours today, we’ve repeatedly seen WoW realms targeted and taken offline by the attacker(s).”
Even as Blizzard was dealing with all of this, the studio targeted a different issue that was plaguing WoW Classic: exploits via layer hopping. To fix this, Blizzard slapped an increasing cooldown on layer switching for players using them to avoid excessive use.
“We recently developed a hotfix that restricts frequent layer-hopping, without impacting those who simply wish to play with their friends. Following realm restarts earlier today, this hotfix is now live in all realms in the Americas and Oceania region. Now, each time a player moves to a new layer, there will be an increasing amount of time before that player can move to another layer. If a player moves between layers multiple times over a short timeframe, the cooldown can increase to a duration of several minutes (or longer) before they can change layers again. The cooldown will then decrease over time for players who don’t change layers. This hotfix will become active in other regions following their next realm restarts.”
