This is not a DDOS, Tell the truth SE.

A DDOS in pretty much all scenarios is a consistent denial of service attack, if it were happening it would not be as inconsistent as this "DDOS" is.

Even with DDOS protection in place, it would still not be this inconsistent.

This is a server overload or server hardware issue, I'm not buying the excuse.

Please fix the actual problem.

I just got booted out of the game, this is the final server error for me today.

It's fun paying a monthly sub for a game that keeps kicking you out.

They did outright lie about their system dropping people during Endwalker's release being the fault of people's connections and not their queue system (as found out during wireshark analysis), so not like they've been shown to be 100% honest.

Every DDoS is a spy vs spy game with the bad guys.

They attack, you put in a countermeasure, they circumvent that and continue the attack, you circumvent that, and the cycle continues.

Unless you want to implement some rather draconian privacy violations to make sure that attacks such as this are traced back to everybody involved and punished, we have to accept that there will be disruptions.

Facts in support of DDOS:
- WoW just introduced a premium currency and a lot of people are upset. Usually, a DDOS coincides with bad news in WoW.
- A lot of bots got banned, so the bot owners are taking it out on FFXIV.
- We correctly deduced that "other" countries like Malaysia, Philippines, etc. were behind last year's DDOS due to the payment processor change. Maybe they're still having trouble paying their subs?

Facts in support of server overload:
- FFXIV is still the world's most popular MMO with over 30 million players (WoW, in comparison, only has around 3 million). We know that Square Enix did not anticipate FFXIV being this popular.
- A lot of people are running the new deep dungeon (if the game world feels empty, this is why).

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by hydralus

They did outright lie about their system dropping people during Endwalker's release being the fault of people's connections and not their queue system (as found out during wireshark analysis), so not like they've been shown to be 100% honest.

---

I wouldn't consider this a lie but more Occams Razor, the statement they made was they outright didin't know this issue existed until dedicated players tracked it down, This is more damaging to them than it being a lie.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by caffe_macchiato

Facts in support of DDOS:
- WoW just introduced a premium currency and a lot of people are upset. Usually, a DDOS coincides with bad news in WoW.
- A lot of bots got banned, so the bot owners are taking it out on FFXIV.
- We correctly deduced that "other" countries like Malaysia, Philippines, etc. were behind last year's DDOS due to the payment processor change. Maybe they're still having trouble paying their subs?

Facts in support of server overload:
- FFXIV is still the world's most popular MMO with over 30 million players (WoW, in comparison, only has around 3 million). We know that Square Enix did not anticipate FFXIV being this popular.
- A lot of people are running the new deep dungeon (if the game world feels empty, this is why).

---

That would point only in the direction of DDOS, since the two "points" made in favor of a server overload aren't accurate. The "30 million players" number is the total number of accounts that have been registered over the lifetime of the game, not the actual number of *active* accounts. WoW's number (which is closer to 2 million) is the number of *active* WoW accounts. FFXIV is probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 750k-1 million at this point in time. In a similar fashion, we're in the typical population "trough" at this point in the expansion's life cycle, so even with specific bits of new content coming out (e.g. deep dungeon), the overall population is well below what it is at "peak" times in the cycle. It's non-sensical that server overload would be to blame.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by caffe_macchiato

Facts in support of DDOS:
- WoW just introduced a premium currency and a lot of people are upset. Usually, a DDOS coincides with bad news in WoW.
- A lot of bots got banned, so the bot owners are taking it out on FFXIV.
- We correctly deduced that "other" countries like Malaysia, Philippines, etc. were behind last year's DDOS due to the payment processor change. Maybe they're still having trouble paying their subs?

Facts in support of server overload:
- FFXIV is still the world's most popular MMO with over 30 million players (WoW, in comparison, only has around 3 million). We know that Square Enix did not anticipate FFXIV being this popular.
- A lot of people are running the new deep dungeon (if the game world feels empty, this is why).

---

Fact check yourself.

This is horribly WRONG.

I have trouble believing it's a DDoS for the simple fact that everytime people drop, it's always the same people kicked and the same people not affected. That seems more like some type of ISP issue or something else other than a DDoS on the game itself.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Shipp

I have trouble believing it's a DDoS for the simple fact that everytime people drop, it's always the same people kicked and the same people not affected. That seems more like some type of ISP issue or something else other than a DDoS on the game itself.

---

Got DC'd last night but generally no problems outside of that one-off incident this week. It couldn't ever possibly be anything else but a DDOS though, riiiiiight?

DDOS' are universal. It's not "like 2 people are fine" because they wouldn't be fine. It nukes the entire server. Some people just can't get a grip.

It's only on NA server too I went to EU and haven't dced at all

NA dced 2 times in one hr it's so annoying.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by caffe_macchiato

- FFXIV is still the world's most popular MMO with over 30 million players (WoW, in comparison, only has around 3 million). We know that Square Enix did not anticipate FFXIV being this popular.

---

Server load is taxed by the number of simultaneously online players, not historical accounts. Over the last several months, upper realistic estimates place XIV at less than 2 million different accounts having logged in per month, which says nothing of how little they play.

We are at a small fraction of our highest stable server loads. Whether that hints at DDoS or changes to how service is provided, though, would depend on the characteristics of the service's shortfalls.

This has been happening every day, yet they only acknowledged November 3rd and 4th. At this point, I just want SE to tell... anything.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by BlisteringFrost

Got DC'd last night but generally no problems outside of that one-off incident this week. It couldn't ever possibly be anything else but a DDOS though, riiiiiight?

DDOS' are universal. It's not "like 2 people are fine" because they wouldn't be fine. It nukes the entire server. Some people just can't get a grip.

---

I mean there definitely is something affecting a large number of players at the same time. I haven't been affected at all when 90% of my FC gets booted at the same time. The other people in my FC that aren't booted are also never affected by it for some reason. Yet the people booted are all booted every time. Something is weird about it. I've never seen a DDoS that acts like that, but I'm also not a whiz at knowing everything about them these days, either.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by brinn12

This has been happening every day, yet they only acknowledged November 3rd and 4th. At this point, I just want SE to tell... anything.

---

Because it's not always a DDOS.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by BlisteringFrost

Because it's not always a DDOS.

---

I don't think you understood my post

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Hyperia

Every DDoS is a spy vs spy game with the bad guys.

They attack, you put in a countermeasure, they circumvent that and continue the attack, you circumvent that, and the cycle continues.

Unless you want to implement some rather draconian privacy violations to make sure that attacks such as this are traced back to everybody involved and punished, we have to accept that there will be disruptions.

---

Yeah. Pretty much the only solid countermeasure to ddos is it's own isolated internet where ip/mac whatever is directly tied to your personal id. So you couldn't just swap id and continue the attack.

So currently it bogs down to countries encouraging or sanctioning each other to curb the distribution of bots used for malware and ddosing.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by brinn12

I don't think you understood my post

---

Incorrect.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Shipp

I have trouble believing it's a DDoS for the simple fact that everytime people drop, it's always the same people kicked and the same people not affected. That seems more like some type of ISP issue or something else other than a DDoS on the game itself.

---

Perhaps not the game itself is targeted but one of the network nodes

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by WillIrishclover

I wouldn't consider this a lie but more Occams Razor, the statement they made was they outright didin't know this issue existed until dedicated players tracked it down, This is more damaging to them than it being a lie.

---

You're correct, it's not 100% certain it was a lie, I misspoke.

with the fact that its only NA, its likely not SE servers themselves being attacked. Likely some nodes... which is why not everyone gets DCd every time.

It could also be related to the high solar activity this past week. Bit of a coincidence that this happens same time. Solar radiation can effect internet.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by justausername

with the fact that its only NA, its likely not SE servers themselves being attacked. Likely some nodes... which is why not everyone gets DCd every time.

It could also be related to the high solar activity this past week. Bit of a coincidence that this happens same time. Solar radiation can effect internet.

---

That'd make too much sense. See, if it ISN'T a DDOS, which it TOTALLY has to be, then we couldn't get..... c o m P e n S A t i o N!

Apparently people from Arizona, and people using VPNs to route through Arizona, aren't being kicked offline. I'm going to try it now and see if it works.
edit: I left the game on with a vpn running from AZ for a few hours while I took a nap. I returned to a 90002 error lmao...

From a long time subber - whatever excuse is being used, disconnecting of large groups of paying folks is not acceptable. Troubleshooting and resolving takes humans with brains. Find some, pay them, and fix this.

Ive been DC'd over a dozen times this weekend. I'm sick of paying over 35 dollars a month for this game while continually getting kicked while you guys have the inability to fix the darn problem. You are a billion dollar company. DO BETTER.

Oceania (Materia) is not DCing people atm, I'm currently visiting Ravana to craft.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by luv2board58

Ive been DC'd over a dozen times this weekend. I'm sick of paying over 35 dollars a month for this game while continually getting kicked while you guys have the inability to fix the darn problem. You are a billion dollar company. DO BETTER.

---

Have you tried playing another game? Maybe not paying for ALL RETAINERS if the cost is the issue?

A DDoS is meant to be due to hacked machines with viruses being commanded to send malicious packets all at once. Thus, if they continued doing it regularly, the owners of those machines might notice. Most likely they don't want to permanently ban lots of IPs because they could be dynamic and result in lots of player bans, so it becomes trying to figure out which traffic is malicious as it happens.

I suspect most of the DDoS attacks are not even aimed at FFXIV. Most likely FFXIV gets caught in the crossfire from DDoS against other services hosted at the same data center or nearby locations, or in other cases major ISPs decide to throttle traffic causing packet loss for most FFXIV players due to most of them crossing through that ISP's wires.

The recent ones do seem more directly aimed at the data center as opposed to nearby ISPs, because it seems to be affecting everyone rather than just certain players on certain routes.

It is really a problem though. How can we do the new content, the deep dungeon, knowing all our progress might be lost? My entire party disconnected in the 71-100 range but fortunately one of them anticipated it and logged out and back in pre-emptively to avoid the attack, allowing them to get back in before the rest of our characters were properly logged out. My last run, I didn't notice any issues but 2 players died and they said they loaded in dead from their perspective, so it was obviously a DDoS that wiped us and shortly after the failed run I got disconnected too.

If I decide to do a raid, how do I know a DDoS won't disband our whole party while we're progressing it?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Avoidy

Apparently people from Arizona, and people using VPNs to route through Arizona, aren't being kicked offline. I'm going to try it now and see if it works.

---

That was my strategy when only certain players were being affected by DDoS a year or so ago. I thought, let's route through Arizona instead of directly across the middle of America and usually it was better. Eventually, it felt like SE's own countermeasures started catching me because of the VPN IP itself being a datacenter IP, and disabling the VPN then stopped me disconnecting.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

A DDoS is meant to be due to hacked machines with viruses being commanded to send malicious packets all at once. Thus, if they continued doing it regularly, the owners of those machines might notice. Most likely they don't want to permanently ban lots of IPs because they could be dynamic and result in lots of player bans, so it becomes trying to figure out which traffic is malicious as it happens.

I suspect most of the DDoS attacks are not even aimed at FFXIV. Most likely FFXIV gets caught in the crossfire from DDoS against other services hosted at the same data center or nearby locations, or in other cases major ISPs decide to throttle traffic causing packet loss for most FFXIV players due to most of them crossing through that ISP's wires.

The recent ones do seem more directly aimed at the data center as opposed to nearby ISPs, because it seems to be affecting everyone rather than just certain players on certain routes.

It is really a problem though. How can we do the new content, the deep dungeon, knowing all our progress might be lost? My entire party disconnected in the 71-100 range but fortunately one of them anticipated it and logged out and back in pre-emptively to avoid the attack, allowing them to get back in before the rest of our characters were properly logged out. My last run, I didn't notice any issues but 2 players died and they said they loaded in dead from their perspective, so it was obviously a DDoS that wiped us and shortly after the failed run I got disconnected too.

If I decide to do a raid, how do I know a DDoS won't disband our whole party while we're progressing it?

---

Play another game until they fix it I guess.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

A DDoS is meant to be due to hacked machines with viruses being commanded to send malicious packets all at once. Thus, if they continued doing it regularly, the owners of those machines might notice. Most likely they don't want to permanently ban lots of IPs because they could be dynamic and result in lots of player bans, so it becomes trying to figure out which traffic is malicious as it happens.

I suspect most of the DDoS attacks are not even aimed at FFXIV. Most likely FFXIV gets caught in the crossfire from DDoS against other services hosted at the same data center or nearby locations, or in other cases major ISPs decide to throttle traffic causing packet loss for most FFXIV players due to most of them crossing through that ISP's wires.

The recent ones do seem more directly aimed at the data center as opposed to nearby ISPs, because it seems to be affecting everyone rather than just certain players on certain routes.

It is really a problem though. How can we do the new content, the deep dungeon, knowing all our progress might be lost? My entire party disconnected in the 71-100 range but fortunately one of them anticipated it and logged out and back in pre-emptively to avoid the attack, allowing them to get back in before the rest of our characters were properly logged out. My last run, I didn't notice any issues but 2 players died and they said they loaded in dead from their perspective, so it was obviously a DDoS that wiped us and shortly after the failed run I got disconnected too.

If I decide to do a raid, how do I know a DDoS won't disband our whole party while we're progressing it?

That was my strategy when only certain players were being affected by DDoS a year or so ago. I thought, let's route through Arizona instead of directly across the middle of America and usually it was better. Eventually, it felt like SE's own countermeasures started catching me because of the VPN IP itself being a datacenter IP, and disabling the VPN then stopped me disconnecting.

---

Oceania isnt having that issue atm, have your static visit there.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Hyperia

Every DDoS is a spy vs spy game with the bad guys.

They attack, you put in a countermeasure, they circumvent that and continue the attack, you circumvent that, and the cycle continues.

Unless you want to implement some rather draconian privacy violations to make sure that attacks such as this are traced back to everybody involved and punished, we have to accept that there will be disruptions.

---

SE doesn't need you to defend them, they can do it that themselves

I'm not even sure this is a DDoS. Most DDoS last for some time where you're unable to connect. This just kicks people out every so often only to let you reconnect right back. There are long gaps between disconnects like 10-20 minutes or more.

I speculate that it's a problem with NTT's datacenter network where the NA servers are hosted. There network is always laggy to begin with and they even have an on-going problem to this day with their inbound AT&T connection that's been going on for over 2 years now. They won't fix the problem and blame AT&T even though an NTT network admin admitted that the server with the problem is located within NTT's datacenter.

So personally I don't trust the hosting company NTT. They have proven to be garbage since SE moved the FF14 servers to them years ago.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by justausername

with the fact that its only NA, its likely not SE servers themselves being attacked. Likely some nodes... which is why not everyone gets DCd every time.

It could also be related to the high solar activity this past week. Bit of a coincidence that this happens same time. Solar radiation can effect internet.

---

Maybe that one NTT node that accounts for more than half of my ping is finally giving up the ghost.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by caffe_macchiato

Facts in support of DDOS:
- WoW just introduced a premium currency and a lot of people are upset. Usually, a DDOS coincides with bad news in WoW.
- A lot of bots got banned, so the bot owners are taking it out on FFXIV.
- We correctly deduced that "other" countries like Malaysia, Philippines, etc. were behind last year's DDOS due to the payment processor change. Maybe they're still having trouble paying their subs?

Facts in support of server overload:
- FFXIV is still the world's most popular MMO with over 30 million players (WoW, in comparison, only has around 3 million). We know that Square Enix did not anticipate FFXIV being this popular.
- A lot of people are running the new deep dungeon (if the game world feels empty, this is why).

---

Those numbers are not active players
Spreading misinformation like this is harmful, same way the wow players are spreading a 9 million active sub number because of a mistranslated french line.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Reimmi

Those numbers are not active players
Spreading misinformation like this is harmful, same way the wow players are spreading a 9 million active sub number because of a mistranslated french line.

---

I'm sure they're aware they aren't active players. Their posts are normally sarcastic. :p

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

I'm sure they're aware they aren't active players. Their posts are normally sarcastic. :p

---

Sarcasm's a bit hard to read in text lol, if thats the case i'll keep that in mind for the future
Haven't seen their posts before

I will not make conclusions or wild guesses, has we are only seeing our end of the problem. We are not seeing SE's end of the issue, leaving a incomplete picture of what's going on.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

I'm sure they're aware they aren't active players. Their posts are normally sarcastic. :p

---

Yeah, the issue is one they're just one seemingly random poster in a string of them making what sounds like a serious post, anyone who doesn't happen to recognize the name isn't likely to pick up on that.

34 times all 9002 2002 wtf

All my sub boils down to is I'm paying rent to a landlord who can't keep the house open on demand. It's fucking embarrassing.