Blizzard seem to have a penchant for grossly underestimating the size of their fanbase, and the latest example of this has taken place during the developer’s launch of the latest World of Warcraft expansion, Warlords of Draenor .
According to forum posts by Blizzard community manager Bashiok, Europe, which was first in line to launch Warlords of Draenor , experienced significant latency issues as an overwhelming number of players attempted to access the expansion content all at once. The problems included:
Blizzard worked to create more avenues to entire Draenor through, and this proved to alleviate some of the problems, but a distributed denial of service attack across the servers still presented plenty of problems. A curious image from WoW Insider showing the origins of the DDOS attacks pretty much paints China, rather unsurprisingly, as the obvious culprit: