The Queue: DDoS, WoW's population spike, and flying

Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Adam Holisky (@adamholisky) will be your host today.

I've only answered two questions in the Queue today. Enjoy.

Keleli asked:

Are the DDoS attacks still ongoing or are these queues the norm now?

The DDoS attacks have quieted down now, or at least the effects have stopped. Keep in mind that the queues are not really part of the DDoS attack directly. The DDoS affected the way the servers responded to events and lagged out things badly. It also caused full blown connection issues, to the point where you weren't even able to get into the queue. Now the queue existed in the first place due to two factors: first, the overwhelming population spike that has happened. We don't know the exact numbers, but from what people at Blizzard have said, it's way more than they could ever have anticipated. The second reason the queue existed is because of all the DDoS effects, they lessened the number of people that could be logged in at any one time in order to make the experience for those that were playing better. It was really a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.

Two other things here.

First, I wish people would stop saying the DDoS was a smokescreen/myth. It wasn't, not by a long shot. There have been absolutely tons of third party reports of the massive spike in directed attack traffic pointed directly at Battle.net and Blizzard's servers.

Second, while Blizzard hasn't announced exactly how many people are playing WoW right now, I'm guessing -- and this is just an educated guess -- that the subs are going to be back in the 9 to 10 million range for a bit. It will no doubt decrease, but I don't think we've seen this kind of interest in an expansion, or WoW in general, in a very long time.

Mogs asked:

Call me nuts, but I'm not really missing flying yet.

Several of us are talking about this on Twitter right now, and I agree entirely. The immersion that's happened with Draenor and not flying has been something magical.

I think there'll come a time when we need to have flying in Draenor, but the more that I'm playing through the finalized content, the more I'm thinking that time should be when the next expansion releases. You're running around in an actual world, having to deal with actual things. It's not trivial anymore to just find nodes and farm them, you can't just dive bomb to the location of the treasure chests. You have to run around, kill baddies, and make your way through hell just to get a small gem.

A waste of time? No, not at all. It's a game, and we're finally playing what feels like an actual game again. These RPGs all began with Dungeons and Dragons, where you went stomping around to get treasures and save the world. You never just lifted off and flew to your destination -- you fought tooth and nail to get there. Computerized RPGs had this same feeling for a long time, until, frankly, WoW started making things easier. From there it just snowballed, it seems like. We need negative feedback, aka consequences, to our actions. We need things to be difficult sometimes. We need to be able to feel like we're really part of the world, and not some demigod flying about untouched.

Draenor is a savage land, and I want Blizzard to keep it that way.

#MicDrop