First time I ever heard of ddosing was when they did it to WoW and Wildstar and the other mmo’s less than half a year ago (still 2014). Might wanna dial back that condescension and not act like it’s a 20 year old problem that’s as common as sunshine.
Actually it is literally a 20 year old problem that’s as common as sunshine. smurf.c was released in 1997. (Released, not discovered. Who knows how long ago that was.)
do people seriously have sympathy for blizzard, a multimillion or billion dollar company, that has literally helped influence video game culture along its track of sexism, misogyny, and mountain dew gulping, but who’s executives did not stop and think “maybe with all these revolutionary game systems we could maybe try to predict and stop a massive DDOS attack on our game that is both hated and beloved across the entire planet Earth”
I feel bad for every underpaid employee working at blizzard during times like this, though. An MMO launch and security problem this bad usually means “everyone is working 80+ hours a week with no compensation, especially the people who already make the least doing QA or support”. Meanwhile, every executive is having a post-launch party.
So if you can figure out how to predict an attack that can do more than three hundred four hundred billion bits per second of traffic, you stand to make a lot of money.
What you’re literally they should do is say “Oh maybe we should try to predict thousands (possibly millions) of computers simultaneously attacking our game and overloading our provider’s connections with traffic and do something about that.”