Deep Dungeons and DDoS Attacks

Let's cut to the chase, Long story short.
Getting disconnected in a deep dungeon on floors 91-100 is extremely frustrating.

Playing on Materia should not be a requirement to play the game when you are from a NA DC. If server stability is out of question, what other protections can we as players have for solo deep dungeons?

Some ideas I had were:
Keeping the instance open for 10 minutes: This allows players who are get disconnected on lower floor a chance to come back and continue the run, unless they die.
Would have no effect on higher floors as the timer would keep going/they'd die to a boss mechanic.

Allowing continues with 1 KO:
This allows players who disconnect the ability to reconnect at a later time and give it another go. Potentially exploitable but in reality allowing this wouldn't let anyone who isn't ready to clear a chance to clear.

If Possible, Allowing the server to detect massive drops and reset the save file.
I heard the server will do this if the server itself fails. If the same could be done when detecting massive player disconnections it would solve the problem almost entirely.

The argument is that it would make solo titles too easy to obtain, but I just don't see that being the case.
Losing hours upon hours of progress through no fault of your own is not an enjoyable gameplay mechanic, and with as often as it is happening to the NA DC in particular. We need some sort of counter balance.

literally this, SE please do something. DDOS attacks have been a problem for so long and it's so painful to lose hours or days of hard work to a server issue.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by GioTrance

If Possible, Allowing the server to detect massive drops and reset the save file.
I heard the server will do this if the server itself fails. If the same could be done when detecting massive player disconnections it would solve the problem almost entirely.

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This one feels like the most fair, and least likely to have players abusing it. +1

Just got DC'd at lvl 97 solo due to that... I am not happy

Agreed. Been trying to completely runs since yesterday. Have somehow been able to get one run both days, and now just repeatedly being kicked from every run I attempt. Getting really old.

I would really just like to be able to play the game I pay to play, without other people being able to deny my ability to, just because it's somehow fun for them to do.

I just got disconnected on floor 98, on the way to 99, during a Pilgrims’ Passage party run and everyone in the group got kicked out at the same time. The run is gone, just one step away from another clear. This isn’t the first time it’s happened. I’ve lost countless Deep Dungeon runs mostly solo. The most frustrating ones all solo PT floor 76, PotD 158, and EO 83. Every single time, hours of careful progress vanished instantly because of disconnections or server issues. I’ve spoken to GMs before, but they can’t reset death counts to make the run valid again and understandably, they also can’t just hand out the rewards. Still, it’s incredibly demoralizing to lose hours of dedication with no way to recover the run. At this point, I really feel like Deep Dungeons need some kind of protection against unexpected disconnects or crashes.

Please, give us something to preserve progress when it’s clearly not our fault.

I think a run should have a "grace reset" for this exact reason.
If you get d/ced the run would reset back to the beginning of the set. It would only do this once though per sets of floors attempts; this would be a way just to make sure it's not getting abused.

With the way the system is now I have never bothered to do many solo attempts even though I know I'm capable of doing it.

keeping instance alive for 5 minutes after losing signal from player is neither hard thing to do, nor leading to exploits.
There is simply no will, no money incentive.

People have asked for this since Heavensward and it just isn't something they seem interested in.

Its pretty stupid that the game asks you to do something for a solo achievement that its own servers cannot reliably provide.

After two weeks of constant issues, I’m officially done trying to push through this. Yesterday I lost another Pilgrim Party run at floor 98 due to mass disconnect. Today, I lost two more runs in Eureka Orthos (Solo) one on floor 73 and another at floor 30, with the boss at 2% HP.

That makes over 10 runs lost (actually more I’ve stopped counting at this point), easily more than 50 hours of Deep Dungeon progress gone.

This isn’t an isolated issue. Downdetector show frequent disconnections and instability. Deep Dungeons are some of the most time consuming and punishing content in the game, and losing entire runs because of server instability is beyond frustrating. At this point, the game feels unplayable for anyone trying to do serious content that relies on stable connection.

I could argue in favor of allowing continues with any number of KOs but making the floors harder, particularly the earlier floors. It is slightly odd design to track KOs but ultimately force you to reset with only 1. This would alleviate the d/c's for clear runners and not negatively impact the score runners, who just reset anyway. The latter could also be given some form of tangible reward for the amount of effort they put in.

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Originally Posted by DeepDungeon_Enjoyear

After two weeks of constant issues, I’m officially done trying to push through this. Yesterday I lost another Pilgrim Party run at floor 98 due to mass disconnect. Today, I lost two more runs in Eureka Orthos (Solo) one on floor 73 and another at floor 30, with the boss at 2% HP.

That makes over 10 runs lost (actually more I’ve stopped counting at this point), easily more than 50 hours of Deep Dungeon progress gone.

This isn’t an isolated issue. Downdetector show frequent disconnections and instability. Deep Dungeons are some of the most time consuming and punishing content in the game, and losing entire runs because of server instability is beyond frustrating. At this point, the game feels unplayable for anyone trying to do serious content that relies on stable connection.

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I've lost 8 runs in total between a few deep dungeon solos as well. After losing PT on my main I went to an alt to practice Class-only runs of Palace, just to lose it to DCs. Eventually we had like 8 hours of being okay, so I started PT on my main again to DC.

This is genuinely the only content in the game at all that punishes you for disconnecting. Not even Criterion Dungeons or DRS punishes you this badly.
Even if you take the DDoS out of the equation, The Sacramento Node drops connections a lot too. Anyone who doesn't connect through here probably never notices but that node backs up a lot and sometimes gives up.
Obviously Square can't do anything about that themselves, but they should at least acknowledge that it happens.
DC in Criterion/Ultimate, okay we repull. 15 minutes at the worst. DC in DRS? You die, but if the rest of the party still clears you can be raised. Entire party wipe? Idk what the clear speeds are now, but it used to be like 2 hours. That's a raid night, but still manageable you know?
DC in a solo deep dungeon? 20 hours.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by VictorSpoils

I could argue in favor of allowing continues with any number of KOs but making the floors harder, particularly the earlier floors. It is slightly odd design to track KOs but ultimately force you to reset with only 1. This would alleviate the d/c's for clear runners and not negatively impact the score runners, who just reset anyway. The latter could also be given some form of tangible reward for the amount of effort they put in.

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At this point in time I think this is the most fair. Allow players who want the title to continue since they are still putting in all the effort, but reset the score.
Hell, even if they hard capped us at 3 KOs to but reset our score each "Continue" I see no way how anyone who still clears "doesn't" deserve it. How someone can abuse it as a way to reset bad floors. Or how it effects Score Players.

It feels like absolute -garbage- to have 2 save files on Floor 91 with 1 KO, and knowing there is nothing you can do while still not being at fault.

I know it's probably not easy to do because other games struggle with this as well, but the best solution imo would be to have a replay feature that literally saves the state of the game as soon as a character goes ?????
Reconnecting would resync with the game in the exact same state. If you were fighting, then you'd go back to fighting with everybody's HP and state reinstated as they were.

Chat we just got DDOS'd out of PT at floor 99
its so over

I wish they acknowledge and do something about this issue. Got two runs interrupted today in the span of a few hours. As I guess many of you do, I often do Solo runs for the title. It's really not fun to redo the earlier floors over and over because some jerk in a basement pressed the funny button or something.

One of the worst parts of this whole thing, to me at least, is logging back in and just seeing everyone spawn by the entrance, knowing we all got [Redacted] for reasons beyond our control. Like, what can we do about it? Nothing. What do we do? Pray we can speedrun a set of floors before we get forcibly dragged out the door next time.

Something needs to be done. Either about the DDOS in general or at least to protect Deep Dungeon runs.
From the proposed solutions, resetting the save to a prior state, or allowing us to continue accumulating KOs while resetting the score to 0 both seem fine.

whats even crazier is that current system is super exploitable if someone was dedicated enough. If you disconnect and just close the game, it seems the server will see you as online indefinately and keep at least a bit of the instance in memory. You can ask your friends if you are visible as online on friend list and if they can /tell you (they will receive character being bound by duty error).
So now imagine what could someone with x botted free trial accounts could do. Enter in there... and just disconnect, leave it like that to clog the server memory. How many would it take to basicly achieve a ddos attack?

So yeah, keeping the instance 'alive' for 5 minutes after player disconnects and discarding it once timer passes would be good both for players and servers

A few seconds before entering Forked Tower, I got disconnected. I managed to come back in time, but since the portal was already open, the game removed my cypher due to the DC, and I couldn’t replace it even though the party was still going in.

Honestly, it's about time to migrate to proper cloud infrastructure. Their decade-old servers clearly can’t handle the load anymore. And considering this is a paid game with a monthly subscription fee, it feels unfair. Players invest time and money, and it’s frustrating even offensive to see “your subscription has been renewed” one day and run into issues like this the next.

My partner and I were on floor 154 or so when this happened to us last night. Our duo run lost over 100 floors to a party KO that happened when the servers disconnected us. Frustrating, to say the least.

I've been running pilgrim's traverse 71-100 whenever I get the time (simply for fun).

They seem to have instituted some mitigations which have contained disconnects, because instead of the whole party getting 90k'd it's just 1 or 2 now.