IT's F*CKING OVER | Asmongold TV

The clip of a World of Warcraft raid boss fight is playing, and you can hear the panic in the voices of the players as, one by one, their characters freeze, go offline, or start running into walls. The boss, still active, begins healing back up because the tank who was holding its attention disconnected. Within seconds, the entire raid group is dead. The cause, according to the streamer Asmongold reacting to the clip, was a targeted DDoS attack on the Blizzard servers at the worst possible moment. The wipe was total, and because the guild OnlyFangs was playing on Hardcore mode, every character that died was deleted permanently.

The Finality of Hardcore WoW

Asmongold explains the stakes for viewers unfamiliar with the game mode. In Hardcore Classic WoW, when your character dies, it is gone forever. "No ifs, ands, or buts, no takesy backsies," he says. Blizzard has a strict policy of never restoring characters, regardless of the cause of death. This means that the DDoS attack, which knocked dozens of players offline simultaneously during a boss encounter, effectively erased thousands of collective hours of gameplay in a matter of minutes. The timing of the attack was the only reason it was so devastating—the servers were only down for roughly five minutes, but that was enough to kill the raid.

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