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Under the Surface of Azeroth:
A Network Baseline and Security Analysis
of Blizzard's World of Warcraft
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Section 1: An Overview of World of Warcraft
To generically describe Blizzard's World of Warcraft universe as "massive" doesn't accurately express the breadth and depth of the gameplay, characters, equipment options, and monsters in this installment of the Warcraft franchise. The Kingdom of Azeroth has been dramatically recreated as a living and breathing world that's full of quests, intrigue, character interactions, and ongoing events. Players subscribing to this universe find seemlessly unlimited options for their role-playing entertainment.
Creating a rich living and breathing universe from photons and electrons wasn't created on a whim. A huge amount of planning, testing, and constant refining is required to maintain and expand this entertaining and social meeting place. Because there's also a required online component, the technology behind World of Warcraft must also account for different computing platforms, network connections, and security concerns. As with real life, cheating and manipulation of the system is also an ongoing challenge for Blizzard, and they've created an architecture that allows them to manage all of these issues.
Architecting World of Warcraft From the user's perspective, the World of Warcraft universe is a graphical and colorful experience that's filled with music, ambient sounds, and activity. The trees sway, the songs of birds can be heard in the distance, and rain and fog occasionally roll in as part of a constantly changing environment where the sun really does rise and set.
Early in the development of World of Warcraft, Blizzard was faced with the engineering task of combining both a rich gaming experience with a dynamic user environment. High-speed Internet connectivity was not widespread in the United States, which meant that their new world would need to work effectively across 56 kilobit-per-second dialup modem connections. Scalability is always an issue when developing a multi-user application, and the back-end services and connectivity would be under increasing stress as the user population grew larger.
