World of Warcraft will rollback some Hardcore mode permadeaths

Blizzard has announced that it will make exceptions to its hardcore permadeath policy and allow some characters to return to life. According to a report in Ars Technica, Blizzard made the pronouncement in response to a string of DDoS attacks that seemed specifically targeted to cause the in-game deaths of members of a high-profile raiding guild.

Hardcode mode was introduced with World of Warcraft Classic. It’s a super intense, extremely difficult style of play where a character’s death is permanent no matter how it comes — whether it be falling in a mythic difficulty dungeon, getting ganked in PvP, or simply getting overrun by level 1 boars — is permanent. In regular WoW, characters can come back from or cheat death with a variety of mechanics which are disabled in Hardcore. The game mode has other adjustments, like requiring players to manually set their PvP flag, that Blizzard made to make the mode slightly less punishing.

Until now, there were no exceptions to the policy even in situations outside of a player’s control such as a death suffered during disconnection from the game server. And it seems like malicious actors were exploiting that strict policy to cause the deaths of members of a popular streaming guild OnlyFangs. According to Ars Technica, DDoS attacks seemed to coincide with the guild’s raiding attempts causing the permadeath of several members. The attacks were so frequent that soadapoppin, a popular Twitch streamer and OnlyFangs’ member, suggested that the guild might need to shutter operations indefinitely unless some kind of protections were put in place.

Blizzard addressed the issue on the World of Warcraft forums saying that it is aware of the targeted nature of the DDoS attacks and are taking steps to rollback some player deaths

“We’re taking steps to resurrect player-characters that were lost as a result of these attacks,” wrote WoW Classic associate production director Clay Stone. “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.”