“Retrominano” was the top ranked Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 player, globally, on the Xbox 360. That is, until he had to reset his own stats in order to avoid continued Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks originating from somewhere in the U.S.

Being the top ranked individual in any field has a tendency to attract a lot of attention. Unfortunately, for Retrominano, being the number 1 Black Ops 2 player on the Xbox 360 generated some most unwanted attention from a harasser (or harassers) in the U.S. using DDOS attacks to keep him from being able to connect to Xbox Live for more than 10 minutes at a time.

According to Wikipedia, “a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) or distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) is an attempt to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users. Although the means to carry out, motives for, and targets of a DoS attack may vary, it generally consists of the efforts of one or more people to temporarily or indefinitely interrupt or suspend services of a host connected to the Internet.”

Retrominano explains his situation to a friend through this message:

According to this Reddit post, Retrominano tried resetting is IP address numerous times, but to no avail. In the short amount of time he actually could play online, his games were constantly joined by his attackers harassing him over Xbox Live. Left with no choice, Retrominano reset his own Black Ops 2 stats order to avoid continued attacks.

He took this shot of himself after resetting his stats back to level 1.

This marks a sad day in gaming when one is attacked online for simply being the top ranked player in a videogame. What’s worse is that most average gamers have no means of defending themselves from such attacks.

What are your thoughts?

Via, Gameranx