Tower Diving Time

Server Go Boom

Last night was the launch of Highmaul in World of Warcraft, or at least it should have been.  For the majority of the night we tried in vain to log into Argent Dawn.  While a handful of us made it to the character select screen, even fewer of us made it in game.  Those in game however could not actually play the game, as the world was just fundamentally broken…  mobs un-lootable or not spawning at all.  All of the problems seemed to be related to the Chicago data center, where the Ruin battle group that Argent Dawn is attached to is located.  Lately there has been a lot of talk of Distributed Denial of Service Attacks going on against the various MMO providers, but this is a nebulous concept that most people struggle to really understand.  Thankfully there is a site like IPViking that can visualize this traffic in a way that it makes sense.  Watching their attack map is like watching missile launches in some war game simulation…  both terrifying and mesmerizing at the same time.  The above image sadly is not from last night, but just one they have as an example on their website.

During the launch of Warlords of Draenor, there were very clear attacks against Blizzard.  Last night however I did not actually see attacks targeting blizzard, but instead attack after attack targeting the St Louis area.  I could only assume that the attacks are associated in some way to the things surrounding Ferguson in the St Louis metro area.  This however speaks to the way the internet actually works, instead of the way that we all assume it works.  The hard facts are there are a limited number of pathways across the United States, and if an attack is blocking traffic from reaching the Chicago data center, it is effectively also blocking anyone from reaching those servers.  I ran a traceroute last night and from Tulsa area my packets went to Dallas before going over to the AT&T network somewhere in the vicinity of Wichita before the packets just died.  I can only assume that the packets kept getting lose in the maelstrom of attacks between me and the Chicago data center.

Tower Diving Time

After a point I gave up on trying to get into anything within World of Warcraft, and wandered between a couple of games.  My original intent was to do some Syrcus Tower on my Bard job, but when I got into Final Fantasy XIV the dps queue for Syrcus was reporting 30 minutes… which is significantly longer than I have ever actually seen it.  So I abandoned that notion and instead decided to play some Heroes of the Storm.  My good friend Rae finally managed to get her invite from Blizzard and apparently spent the better part of last night playing it as well.  I had a strong feeling that she would like the game, based on her seeming love of League of Legends.  For me it is a much stronger game because I like its focus on the team win, and not so much on individual performance.  That said Rae was still constantly checking the meters during the matches, which I can only hope will be something that fades over time as those League tendencies potentially fall away.

I had really not played it much since the game reset that happened awhile back, wiping out our progress.  As such I had completed the tutorial but was still sitting at level 1, having not actually played any real matches to level up with.  Thanks to the +50% xp friend bonus, I managed to level up last night to five, and unlock many of the features of the game.  I’ve noticed that they have front loaded a lot of the stuff so that you get the interesting items sooner.  At level 5 it feels like I have all of the tools needed to really play the character how I would want to.  I am a huge fan of Muradin and in all the  times playing the game, that has been the character that most fits what I want to play.  That said I am also rather fond of Raynor and Tyrael… and if I am going to play a support you can’t beat Uther.  I think the main reason why I like Muradin is his Avatar ability that causes him to grow in size and become extremely sturdy, allowing me to tower dive obstacles if I really need to, or survive team fights.  With passive health regeneration he has some serious sustain, and most of the time I never actually needed to return to base.

Bloggy XMAS Countdown

I feel bad that I did not advertise this sooner, but there is an event that I am going to be part of that is happening in the blogosphere.  The awesome Syl of MMO Gypsy had this idea of creating a virtual advent calendar of sorts within the blogging community.  Apparently in her country it is custom to decorate the various shops and houses around town to represent a day of the advent.  As such she has created this truly awesome Advent Calendar of gaming blogs.  I am currently scheduled to be one of the posters for 12/9 and I will begin prepping for that soon.  The problem is I am still not quite sure what I am going to talk about.  I have a few ideas, but we will just have to see how that sorts out.  In the meantime this is day three of the postings and I highly suggest you go back to the first and read your way forward.  I thank Syl for coming up with the idea and making it happen, and once again there has been this massive outpouring of support which is truly awesome.