How does SE plan to handle any DDOS (if one does happen) on early acces?

I ask this because I my self have delt DDOS many times in mmos and its extremely frustrating to deal with. Such as the early access for Archeage that was DDOS for good 2-3 days.

My question isnt really about HOW Square Enix will stop it. (If one was to happen. What I truly hope doesnt) But more along the lines of how will they make sure "US the players" who preorder Heavensward for early access are rewarded IF one was to happen?

I understand that they cant simply make early access longer and delay the official launch. But surely there is something?

Uh.. You'll be rewarded by the servers eventually coming back up?

Honestly, even with the 3 day early access I don't expect to get much play time for at least the first week after launch.. Experience tells me all too well, launches rarely ever go very smoothly and SE really hasn't given me much confidence in that regards.. Seriously, we STILL get instance server full issue every once in a while.. How will they deal with the added load upon launch? I don't think they can.

My only hope is that SE somehow finds a way to reimburse the players by free gametime (maybe a week), but that's completely optional and on SE's hands though, it would be nice to get, but I don't expect it.

Actually, I just thought of a second hope, that either Sony or SE screws up and console players are locked out of joining the servers at launch.. and PC player base get to play on a nice empty server. It's mean, but you know it's plausible :)

If there is DDOS, they will probably just compensate us with free sub (like during 2.0 launch).

Most people foresee early launch/release server overload and whatnots. Regulate your expectations.

I think you should be asking how do players intend to handle it?

Answer: Extreme rage, and lots of tears.

Emergency maintanence incoming!

On June 23rd, I'm going to back away from HW or FFXIV, and play my Skyrim for a complete 7 days.

When things quiet down and the fanboys stop screaming, THEN I'll join in.

Remember Gold Saucer? Yeah, let's not make that happen again.

You should be expecting there to be downtime in the middle of early access, NOT expecting it is just being more optimistic than I am. That said if somehow the servers never go down till HW is properly added in then we all feel awesome, if not we expected it so it isn't nearly as hate filled in our heads.

No reason to think there'll be a DDoS attack on early access and/or release.

However, the servers will likely go down more than once, both planned and unplanned. Login and patch servers especially will have a rough time.

There were problems with the servers during the ARR launch, and they responded by extending the 30 day free trial period by like a week. Maybe if something like that happened they would offer some free game time again.

They only did this though because it was SE's failure to anticipate the heavy server load. If the outage came from the outside, I'm not sure they would offer anything.

SE will be the usual
Plz look forward to it thank you for ur co operation etc
Forum explodes right after server explodes then everyone logs in and then server explodes again.
Ppl raging ITS UNACCEPTABLE FOR IT TO HAPPEN AGAIN SINCE ITS 3.0. But yea c'mon lol it'd be nice to actually have an early access thts meaningful o wait thts just like the zeta headstart, just wishful thinking.

at least they seem to prepare a bit for it with all the equipment maintenances lately. just hoping the players wont cause accidental ddos with the rush :D

The free time from enduring the launch of 2.0 wasn't for compensation of a DDoS attack... unless you consider the massive influx of new players to be a DDoS attack. Yes, that's why that first week was heck of DC's and 3102s, Square hadn't anticipated quite as many people trying to play the game. But then, why would they have, 1.0 was an abysmal failure. 3.0 is hopefully not going to have that problem. Now, if there IS going to be a real DDoS attack, Square won't owe you a thing. If, on the other hand, we have another 2.0 launch fiasco then yes, they will be owing you and it will just be in the form of free play time like last time.

Pretty sure all the users trying to login at once for the new content is enough of a DDOS as it is.

I expect lots of connectivity problems first week and maybe addition of 1 free week subscription for it would be nice.

I'm anticipating a few problems, but nothing worth free time over.

https://static.dyp.im/ErkTAehg85/30c...3a90c65d21.jpg

Actually, one does. There's an entire field of study dedicated to "handling" network security.

Having said that, SE won't do a thing.

Early Access for an Expansion is not Beta all over again. I do not expect near the troubles we had at 2.0 launch. Sure DDOS are not 100% preventable but the other reasons people are giving in this thread shows a serious distrust for SE and other MMO's in general. I think SE has learned how to handle servers just judging from the day to day and the interviews with Yoshida himself. We will see of course but I am planning on being optimistic about the early access.

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Originally Posted by Souljacker

Actually, one does. There's an entire field of study dedicated to "handling" network security.

Having said that, SE won't do a thing.

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Yeah, I'm in IT and that field you are talking about (Computer Information System and Information Assurance) was my major in College. Are there ways of mitigating the attack? Yes, to a point. However, sophisticated DDoS attacks are inherently difficult to deal with since there is no single point of origin you can just cut off and be done with. The only company that has successfully thwarted a strong DDoS attack is Microsoft, which is only due to them being able to spin up thousands of virtual servers on their Azure cloud network. It's why Live was up in a day and PSN was down for weeks. So, yeah... You don't just handle DDoS attacks, you weather them and do your best to stabilize where you can.

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Originally Posted by Malzian

Yeah, I'm in IT and that field you are talking about (Computer Information System and Information Assurance) was my major in College. Are there ways of mitigating the attack? Yes, to a point. However, sophisticated DDoS attacks are inherently difficult to deal with since there is no single point of origin you can just cut off and be done with. The only company that has successfully thwarted a strong DDoS attack is Microsoft, which is only due to them being able to spin up thousands of virtual servers on their Azure cloud network. It's why Live was up in a day and PSN was down for weeks. So, yeah... You don't just handle DDoS attacks, you weather them and do your best to stabilize where you can.

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It would be nice if more people understood this.

It has very little to do with security at all. Best defense is to throw money for redundancy. This costs is covered by the consumers, and is impractical for most services.


Even redundancy to cover unexpected volumes at launches are impractical. You can't just rent stable network equip and maintenance for a few days at a enterprise scale, your talking about spending millions for a singular day. At some point the cost incurred just isn't worth it for anyone.

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Originally Posted by Azmura

I ask this because I my self have delt DDOS many times in mmos and its extremely frustrating to deal with. Such as the early access for Archeage that was DDOS for good 2-3 days.

My question isnt really about HOW Square Enix will stop it. (If one was to happen. What I truly hope doesnt) But more along the lines of how will they make sure "US the players" who preorder Heavensward for early access are rewarded IF one was to happen?

I understand that they cant simply make early access longer and delay the official launch. But surely there is something?

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unless you can't log a single minute between EA and OR your reward is amount of time you could play

and anyway you have EA IG goodies

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Originally Posted by Malzian

Yeah, I'm in IT and that field you are talking about (Computer Information System and Information Assurance) was my major in College. Are there ways of mitigating the attack? Yes, to a point. However, sophisticated DDoS attacks are inherently difficult to deal with since there is no single point of origin you can just cut off and be done with. The only company that has successfully thwarted a strong DDoS attack is Microsoft, which is only due to them being able to spin up thousands of virtual servers on their Azure cloud network. It's why Live was up in a day and PSN was down for weeks. So, yeah... You don't just handle DDoS attacks, you weather them and do your best to stabilize where you can.

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These things actually happen to call attention to lax security, not because there is no defense against them and we should all just give up. The guys who did those attacks (Lizard I believe?) called both targets idiots and they were mostly right.

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Originally Posted by Souljacker

Actually, one does. There's an entire field of study dedicated to "handling" network security.

Having said that, SE won't do a thing.

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How would you know what SE will or will not do?

A DDoS comes in many forms, most of which cannot be effectively 'prevented' and if it was a version they could mitigate, it wouldn't be in their best interests to advertise.

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Originally Posted by Duuude007

How would you know what SE will or will not do?

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Two decades of playing SE games.

Besides that, I don't think that anyone really cares enough about SE to launch an actual DDoS against XIV, so the point is moot. The only issues that we'll likely see will come from actual stress from players.

Why even worry about something like this? lol

There is no point worrying about something that might happen when you won't be able to do anything about if it does.

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Originally Posted by Souljacker

These things actually happen to call attention to lax security, not because there is no defense against them and we should all just give up. The guys who did those attacks (Lizard I believe?) called both targets idiots and they were mostly right.

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Hmmm awful lot of those lax securities which may be used lie in bugs found in the NW or Infra manufacturers equipment, which has little to do with the company using it.

Saying as such I believe LS used a route which only redundancy could prevent. Meaning your security choices are close the service down or, or have a complete separate infrastructure to re route to. And that's pretty much it.
From there they might be able to be handled reactively, but the service is already down.

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Originally Posted by Souljacker

Two decades of playing SE games.

Besides that, I don't think that anyone really cares enough about SE to launch an actual DDoS against XIV, so the point is moot. The only issues that we'll likely see will come from actual stress from players.

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There was an announced imminent DDoS against SE 3-4 months ago, so your awareness of 'SE goings on' seems to be lacking, to say the least. Also, their flagship game remained online for the duration of the window. Magic?

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Originally Posted by Souljacker

These things actually happen to call attention to lax security, not because there is no defense against them and we should all just give up. The guys who did those attacks (Lizard I believe?) called both targets idiots and they were mostly right.

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You seem to have a misunderstanding of what a DDoS attack actually is. These types of attacks do not actually stem from any individual security flaw in a company’s system. Did Lizard Squad call MS and Sony idiots? Yes. Do both companies have issues with their security practices? Yes, most especially Sony. However, DDoS doesn’t take into effect any specific vulnerability and instead leverages the main feature of how the internet works and how servers handle traffic.

The best example is probably the simplest, and that one is the office secretary:

So, let us say for argument’s sake that we have an office building and that building gets a certain amount of letters per day. Each letter needs to be received and read by a secretary who then has three possible options regarding that letter: pass it on to its destination, put the letter into a queue to wait or throw the letter out. We have no idea where the letters are coming from or what they contain, though we have a specific set of rules regarding which of the three actions are taken based on whatever criteria we’ve decided on.

Next, let’s assume that the secretary can read through and sort 1,000 letters a second with 100% accuracy. This means that if 1,000 letters come in it takes 1 second to sort through and follow the appropriate action for it. If 10,000 letters come in, it takes 10 seconds to do this provided no other letters come through in the mean-time. Also let’s assume that the maximum capacity of the room to hold letters is 1,000,000.

If we only ever receive 1,000 letters every second then it’s no problem since the secretary can handle it all and everything is nice and smooth. If we receive 10,000 letters in 2 seconds then the room will still take 10 seconds to empty since we can only handle 1,000 every second. However… if I start receiving 10,000 letters every 2 seconds continuously then the pace at which they arrive will quickly overcome what the secretary can handle and it takes about 111 seconds… a little under two minutes, but at this point the room is full.

This means that no new messages can make it in to the secretary for another full second during which she can only handle 1,000. But since 5,000 have just arrived and only 1,000 get in meaning the other 4,000 get dropped. (This is packet-loss in a nutshell.)

The only… and I mean -only- way do deal with this is to hire more secretaries, or in more realistic terms is to set up new servers to handle the load. This takes both time and money, and typically lots of both. You can’t say things like, ‘Well, we’ll just stop accepting all those letters.’ The paradox there is that someone still needs to sort them to determine if they’re ones we don’t want.

This is the exact problem DDoS causes. Millions of machines sending millions of requests per second to a system, and that system gets overloaded and can no longer deal with the requests and therefore can no longer respond. This is why Microsoft was able to deal with it and Sony was not. Microsoft didn’t need to invest in hardware to put up new servers (to make ‘new secretaries’), they just created thousands of virtual ones to do the work and had the capacity to add even more if they needed to with virtually no expense in time nor money.

So no, we don’t just sit back and give up. We do what we can to anticipate and mitigate, we shore up the best possible system we can manage and wait for the letters to start coming in. Hopefully your redundancy pans out, sometimes it doesn’t, sometimes we have better sorting methods and can handle more traffic… but you can’t stop the letters, all you can do is put as much effort into getting them dealt with and gone before the next round comes in.

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Originally Posted by Azmura

I ask this because I my self have delt DDOS many times in mmos and its extremely frustrating to deal with. Such as the early access for Archeage that was DDOS for good 2-3 days.

My question isnt really about HOW Square Enix will stop it. (If one was to happen. What I truly hope doesnt) But more along the lines of how will they make sure "US the players" who preorder Heavensward for early access are rewarded IF one was to happen?

I understand that they cant simply make early access longer and delay the official launch. But surely there is something?

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I wouldn't worry about it, the servers are going to crash anyway....

I'd be more concerned about how they intend to handle all these players attempting to move to (and AFK'ing in) a few zones. Has everyone forgotten all the Golden Saucer lockout complaints when it first launched?

2.0 launch had serious problems because literally every single player had to connect to the same lobby server when they log in. This has changed.

I still think there will be lobby server traffic jam in the first 2 hours of early access. You can try to handle traffic, but there's a limit to what you can do. And then after that there's the server queues. There's every reason to expect server queues in the thousands during peak time, and that has no solution. If you are on a high-population server, get ready to queue.

I think the OP is referring to DDoS from the absolute tidal wave of players who will be trying to "early access" the HW servers when they go live, not an actual DDoS "attack" like we saw with PSN service, which was due to malicious targeting.

Give the above, I don't think it's really a matter of what SE will do about it, it's a matter of how the players intend to deal with it. When considering how much this game has grown, and how much positive press it's received since the launch of 2.0, it's fair to assume there will be an inevitable DDoS for all or part of the duration of the early access period and literally nothing you can do about it.

Just wait, try to be patient, and hope you get at least one day of early access of out it.

It's possible that SE learned from what happened with the Gold Saucer and will have plenty of extra, possibly temporary servers, to handle the load for certain zones - specifically, I'm thinking the first Ishgard zone you enter after passing through the Gates of Judgment. The way SE's got things set up, the FIRST THING anyone's going to do to experience anything in the expansion requires funneling through that ONE POINT. As soon as Early Access opens, everyone with early access is going to be lined up at the Gates of Judgment. That will be the first wave. As soon as official release happens, that's when the next wave will arrive. By making pretty much everything worth doing having passing through that gate as a requirement, they set themselves up for this, so I hope they're ready to deal with the consequences!

If they're not prepared... I see a strong possibility that it'll be difficult even to zone into Coerthas Central Highlands. The zone will be at capacity!

Early access will mitigate this somewhat, leading me to believe that they offered the feature as much to reduce their own strain as they did as a perk for preorders. Folks that enter Ishgard in the early access days will be able to clear some content and spread out to other zones, making room for others.

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Originally Posted by LineageRazor

If they're not prepared... I see a strong possibility that it'll be difficult even to zone into Coerthas Central Highlands. The zone will be at capacity!

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Also note that:
http://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/commen...iew_at_nantes/
"Both Coerthas West Highlands and the lower layer of Abalathia are accessible at lv50; you can choose where to start. This is to split up the massive number of players that will be doing the main scenario at the same time (both paths will converge later on)."

I'm pretty sure FFXIV will not undergo a Distributed Denial of Service attack any time soon. Not sure why you think it will.... are you planning something???