Blizzard plans to revive WoW Classic Hardcore characters ‘at our sole discretion’, after DDOS attack puts major streamer guild OnlyFangs in the ground

World of Warcraft’s Classic Hardcore is sort of the ideal streamer game—high stakes that can manufacture some top-tier drama, an MMO everyone and their dog has probably played at some point, and a thick layer of nostalgia to keep the whole thing fuelled. Which is why OnlyFangs, a hardcore guild composed almost entirely of big-name streamers and YouTubers, has been doing just that.

Alas, some nerd(s) with a botnet somewhere has made it their mission to ruin everyone’s fun with a DDOS attack—one that saw most of OnlyFangs slain during their Blackwing Lair run. In case you don’t know what a DDOS attack is, it’s where a server is overwhelmed by automated traffic all at once. Such things are sadly routine in our modern era, especially since DDOS providers will target large games to advertise their services.

On a Discord message, shared here via the WoW subreddit, guild leader Sodapoppin saw fit to simply call the whole thing off. He wrote: “I don’t feel comfortable dragging people through getting world buffs, flasks, and consumables etc. just to raid with the anxiety and probably the actuality of just being DDOSed again and dying … GG everyone, f*cking GGs.”

He did, however, mention that if Blizzard happened to roll back the deaths that the game would be back on—and wouldn’t ya know it, that’s exactly what Blizzard is doing. In a post to the official forums, community manager Kaivax writes:

“Recently, we have experienced unprecedented distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that impacted many Blizzard game services … We’re taking steps to resurrect player-characters that were lost as a result of these attacks. Unlike the many other ways characters can die in Hardcore, DDoS attacks are an intentionally malicious effort made by third-party bad actors, and we believe the severity and results of DDoS attacks specifically warrant a different response.”

This is a huge departure from the norm for Blizzard. As Kaivax goes on to mention, the company has a ‘sorry, nothing we can do’ policy in the case of disconnects or network issues. Which is, sort of, fair enough—while Blizzard holds responsibility for the robustness of its servers, I can’t even imagine the sheer workload of investigating every disconnect or network hitch individually.

“In the future, Blizzard may elect—at our sole discretion—to revive Hardcore characters that perish in a mass event which we deem inconsistent with the integrity of the game, such as a DDoS attack.

“Our broader stance on character restorations or death appeals has not changed. To be clear, we do not intend to revive characters which have died due to server disconnects, lag spikes, gameplay bugs, or any other reasons. Blizzard Customer Support cannot assist with issues related to characters who have died on Hardcore realms.”

Responses are a mixture of players saluting Blizzard for doing the right thing and, presumably, hardcore players being a little miffed that it took a streamer guild dying for them to do so. For context, this isn’t the first time the classic hardcore servers have suffered server issues—with some players theorising that Blizzard’s been getting hit hard by DDOS this month due to its recent world first races.

It’s a tricky one. While I don’t doubt there are plenty of characters who’ve died ignoble deaths due to server woes that aren’t their fault—it also strikes me as a nightmare to investigate each and every single report of foul play, and make a judgement call on whether or not it was Blizzard’s fault. Opening those particular floodgates sets an untenable precedent.

Likewise, DDOS attacks are just damn hard to defend against. Not that Blizzard doesn’t have a right to combat them, but they’re becoming increasingly easier to execute—and their nature makes it hard to distinguish a DDOS attack apart from routine traffic until it’s too late and everything’s on fire. FF14 players have been feeling this particular plague too. It’s everywhere. Still, I’m glad some hardcore players are seeing justice—even if selectiveness is, unfortunately, necessary.