Blizzard had some problems with the launch of its latest game. Overwatch 2, the FPS that takes over from its predecessor released six years ago, had a difficult start. Many players were unable to connect to the game servers due to endless waits and bugs of all kinds.
One DDOS attack after another
Accessible since October 4 in the evening, the title has been a victim of its own success, creating endless virtual queues that have demotivated many fans. In some cases, the waiting list showed over 40,000 players waiting and sometimes the loading simply crashed, pushing the most impatient fans back to the very end of the queue. But, according to Blizzard, these concerns are not due to poor management of connection flows.
In a tweet posted on the evening of October 4, Mike Ybarra, president of Blizzard, explained that the company’s servers were under attack by denial of service (DDOS). A few hours later, Aaron Keller, another Blizzard executive, explained that the technical team was on the spot, but that a second attack had been detected, leaving little room for “legitimate” players trying to connect. As a result, connection problems were legion and the long-awaited launch was marred by these technical problems which still do not seem to have been completely resolved, according to the communication fromOverwatch France.
Complicated patches to apply
In a blog post posted on the night of October 5-6, the company apologized for the problems encountered during the launch and said it was in the process of “to add servers to ease the pressure”but unfortunately “The process requires data replication, which adds strain to an already strained system. We are therefore proceeding slowly so as not to cause additional disruption while the developers and engineers are working.” The firm specifies that in certain cases “players were able to see their number in the queue go from a small number to a large number” due to the existence of two separate queues, “one to connect to Battle.net and the other to connect to the game itself”.
It would seem, despite everything, that the technical teams of Blizzard are correcting the bugs one by one to try to forget the chaotic launch of a highly anticipated game. Beyond the connection problems, the few players who managed to access the game also complained of a litany of microbugs with sometimes inventories completely emptied of their contents, contents locked which should not be or outright map issues that cause characters to fall into the game’s buggy abyss.