Overwatch Thread

[king3pj]

Overwatch and Blizzard in general have been hit by lots of DDoS attacks over the last couple weeks. It seems like just about every time I check my Twitter feed I see their customer service account either talking about how they are experiencing issues or letting everyone know that the issues have been resolved.

 

[king3pj]

I actually had to break this into two posts because Sat Guys only allows 5 things to be embedded in a post.










There were actually a lot more than this but I didn't feel like going back any further. I don't know enough about DDoS attacks to know if they can be prevented but someone needs to find a way to do something about this. It's not just Blizzard either. Sony, Microsoft, Steam, and just about every other major online service gets attacked by them from time to time.

Edit: For those not keeping count that's 9 disruptions in the last 10 days.

 

[king3pj]

It continues....

 

[yourbeliefs]

That may be outdated. I was just able to connect to B.Net and a game no problem. Didn't play through it, but that sounds like it's further than some apparently are.

As I posted earlier in the thread, there really isn't a true way to stop DDoS attacks from coming at your service. The key is minimizing the downtime. The amount of servers required to "handle" a DDoS attack is not worth the cost. You'd have multiple servers that most of the time would remain unused, and those things aren't cheap either. Yeah you can argue that Activision can handle the costs but all those servers and the manpower required to deal with them can escalate costs very quickly.

They may also not all be DDoS attacks. Could just be something is acting funky on their servers, which could also be causing issues that are allowing DDoS attacks to be more potent than normal.

 

[king3pj]

That may be outdated. I was just able to connect to B.Net and a game no problem. Didn't play through it, but that sounds like it's further than some apparently are.

As I posted earlier in the thread, there really isn't a true way to stop DDoS attacks from coming at your service. The key is minimizing the downtime. The amount of servers required to "handle" a DDoS attack is not worth the cost. You'd have multiple servers that most of the time would remain unused, and those things aren't cheap either. Yeah you can argue that Activision can handle the costs but all those servers and the manpower required to deal with them can escalate costs very quickly.

They may also not all be DDoS attacks. Could just be something is acting funky on their servers, which could also be causing issues that are allowing DDoS attacks to be more potent than normal.

The same group that did the DDoS attack after Blizzard banned people is taking credit for all this downtime. It seems likely to me that they are telling the truth. It's either that or Blizzard is doing an absolutely terrible job of managing their servers. With the most recent update I posted that's 10 disruptions of service in the last 10 days.

I don't remember there being any problems with the servers before this group decided they were mad at Blizzard, even at launch. Activision/Blizzard may not want to invest in more servers that would only be used in the event of a DDoS attack but when their servers have been taken offline 10 times in the last 10 days it might be time to suck it up and get the servers.

 

[yourbeliefs]

Well the WoW players certainly have a legit complaint to the downtime. I mean we ALL do, but they're paying monthly fees, which obviously include server fees. So if they can't play they can file a business complaint that they're not providing their service that they're paying for.

I'm sure they'll act accordingly.

 

[yourbeliefs]

 

[yourbeliefs]

Looks like we may be getting an Overwatch Dating Simulator!

https://www.destructoid.com/loverwatch-is-a-sex-free-overwatch-dating-sim-388204.phtml

 

[king3pj]

We're up to 12 days in a row now.

 

[yourbeliefs]

Good way to affect the max playerbase..

 

[yourbeliefs]

Well luckily if Battle.Net keeps going down, we don't have to suffer because we have a free version of this game on Steam now!

http://kotaku.com/the-mildly-overwatch-ish-paladins-enters-open-beta-1786708717

This video goes into rather humorous detail about the similarities of this to Overwatch (and even Battleborn)

 

[yourbeliefs]

It's moments like these that make me love playing as Mercy in Overwatch. I really do deserve POTG in this clip because without my revival we would have lost that round. But clearly if I was into Overwatch for the glory I wouldn't keep picking healing characters.

 

[king3pj]

http://www.ign.com/articles/2016/09/28/overwatchs-zarya-joins-heroes-of-the-storm

Zarya has been added to Heroes of the Storm. She doesn't seem like the most natural choice for the second Overwatch character to be added (Tracer was first) but that might just be because I never play as her.

 

[yourbeliefs]

Looks like we may be getting a Halloween loot box event similar to the Summer games with time-exclusive skins, poses, etc.

http://overwatch.metabomb.net/gamep...oween-terror-guide-loot-boxes-items-and-dates

 

[king3pj]

Looks like we may be getting a Halloween loot box event similar to the Summer games with time-exclusive skins, poses, etc.

http://overwatch.metabomb.net/gamep...oween-terror-guide-loot-boxes-items-and-dates

Cool. They do events like this for basically every holiday in Heroes of the Storm so I guess it should be expected that they would in Overwatch too even though I hadn't thought about it. It just seems like the event should have started with the weekly reset on Tuesday and lasted until Halloween to me.

 

[yourbeliefs]

My cousin saw this at NYCC.

 

[yourbeliefs]

Looks like Sombra may have gotten leaked, along with a new gameplay mode.

 

[yourbeliefs]

According to this image the Halloween update starts today. I know it says the 12th but since it's from China, they're a day ahead of us. Also their regular updates are on Tuesdays anyways. king3pj looks like we're going to have to do half Gears 4 and half Overwatch coming up.

 

[king3pj]

Too bad this didn't come out last Tuesday so we could get a solid week in before Gears 4.

 

[yourbeliefs]

Too bad this didn't come out last Tuesday so we could get a solid week in before Gears 4.

Agreed, but obviously that's a little too long for an event if the Summer Games are any indicator.

It looks like a big patch is dropping at 2pm EST which presumably would be for all this. Also, this aligns with the "Evacuation Order" issued for Eichenwalde.

Of course, given how DDoS prone Battle.Net is, I wouldn't be surprised to see another hit this afternoon.