DDoS Attacks Confirmed

[Poisonous]

lol @ all the geniuses just assuming they're lying about it. It's not impossible, but neither is a ddos attack--happens all the time, and it being a ddos attack explains a lot.

Both lodestone and mog station needing emergency maintenance?
Instance servers crashing despite SE bottlenecking them? How do you think that happens?
Literally every type of server involved in the game having issues
EU being so congested it needed 2 extra servers, yet NA's got the same queue times afterwards and we're still having way more issues than JP or EU
This being confirmed as the servers are taken down, giving SE the ability to see that access attempts are still being thrown at it despite no logins

etc
etc
etc

Hey, geniuses who are saying "HM well they didn't say it before so gosh clearly somehow that makes it a lie?"

Do YOU have any understanding of how one confirms a ddos attack as opposed to just congestion?

No, guessing not.

People need to step back and realize the limitations of their knowledge instead of rushing to sound smart on a forum.

[Esp]

Does seem fishy, but then again I was getting alot of different issues today that I wasn't getting a few days back. Heck, on day 2 and 3, the servers were doing just fine for me. It wasn't until today I started having issues again, and issues I never had before.

Solo instances freezing up, then disconnecting me outright after staring at a black screen for a few mins. Then I got stuck in a queue. And each time I got booted off, the queue would increase.. I just took it as people were starting to play the game for official release.

Then, the queue got bigger, alot more than I had even seen from the Hyperion server. It had hit 1k+ before it booted me for no reason at all in the Wolf's Den, practicing on a training dummy. I had given up after that..

Things just didn't seem like normal issues I would usually have, and things have been quite ok, until right before maintanence, when shite hit the fan.

Plus if it was a DDoS attack, who knows. That very person could be from the forums for all we know, taking enjoyment from all the posts about the issues. The perfect front row seat.

[MistakeNot]

I am surprised they directly confirmed this at all given that they are a Japanese company and admitting that they were vulnerable to an issue like this is very shameful for them. Directly admitting to what happened to their customers base is not something they would take lightly.

Given that it is near-impossible to defend yourself completely against a DDoS attack it is not exactly shameful to admit you are vulnerable to something that practically every other company in the world are also vulnerable to.

[EponaTBHSMH]

As someone that played and observed the events unfold since the 16th I have my doubts on the sources of the attack

I see a lot of people here in this thread talking about the definition of a DDoS attack and whatever can be the generic motives behind them but, while I do believe that a DDoS "attack" did happen, I'm very doubtful of the sources, when:

1) I've seen in my server at least, players using scripts to click in front Raubahn and Pipin in an attempt to access an instance server that is datacenter-wide for hours and hours long, considering the area in question had 3 instances, each with around 250 players according to the menu, that's around 750ish people either clicking manually or using scripts to access a solo-instance server and constantly hammering it.

if SE claims that attacks did start on the 16th, that part has to be a factor too somewhere in the equation, those are all requests, at high frequency, from several different IP addresses, to one target, at what I would consider a high volume assuming the same thing happened on the rest of the servers/datacenters, it effectively constitutes a Denial of Service to me even if it was not voluntary by those who caused it, the effect is the same.

2) on Primal, while 90002/90006 disconnections loops did happen, they were pretty rare in general until tonight, I did hear that they happened more often on Aether but, the experience has been relatively smooth until tonight

[Yurimi]

lol @ all the geniuses just assuming they're lying about it. It's not impossible, but neither is a ddos attack--happens all the time, and it being a ddos attack explains a lot.

Both lodestone and mog station needing emergency maintenance?
Instance servers crashing despite SE bottlenecking them? How do you think that happens?
Literally every type of server involved in the game having issues
EU being so congested it needed 2 extra servers, yet NA's got the same queue times afterwards and we're still having way more issues than JP or EU
This being confirmed as the servers are taken down, giving SE the ability to see that access attempts are still being thrown at it despite no logins

etc
etc
etc

Hey, geniuses who are saying "HM well they didn't say it before so gosh clearly somehow that makes it a lie?"

Do YOU have any understanding of how one confirms a ddos attack as opposed to just congestion?

No, guessing not.

People need to step back and realize the limitations of their knowledge instead of rushing to sound smart on a forum.

Let us start from the top of this and work our way down.

We just had the official launch of the expansion, the lodestone was having issues with updating character portraits, probably due to new gear not being properly recognized. The mog station? How about all those happy users getting their expansion codes and wanting to register them making the mog stations hits per hour 1000x more than normal and them needing to implement a solution for the extra traffic?

Instance servers crashing? well boy howdy that is actually one of the issues they "fixed" and have JUST now "fixed" again. From the lodestone; "A countermeasure to prevent the system in charge of managing transfers from and to instances, from acting abnormally has been implemented."

Server issues on a new expansion? Don't need a DDoS for that just throw 2-3x more people onto a server than it was really meant to deal with should do just fine

EU getting new servers to deal with a population boom? Also I would question you as to when the NA servers have EVER been as reliable as the JP ones or even the EU ones after the EU data center had stabalized

As for what qualifications do I have to judge things, well I am no server admin for sure. I just work for a national company who has systems that do occasionally have people choosing to DDoS us. I get to read the reports and am required to have at least basic knowledge in order to determine whether our IT guys budget requests are valid or not (such as renting additional racks or server space for promotional events or paying someone (well 4 people on that occasion) to implement an offload system to maintain our online services functionality). I get to wade into the "nerd pit" (their words not mine) quite often so while I am not qualified to fix things but I do feel I am more than qualified to have an opinion on it.

[Waliel]

We had more than "day 1 issues" but that point is, that news-post sounds like "nope, not our fault, totally theirs"...

Only "issues" I've seen on Cerberus after the first day have been long login queues at evening when everyone is home and trying to get it, but that much is normal for a launch.

As for the DDoS itself? Could be either way, but I'm not sure why Squenix would lie about it. Not like they have anything to gain doing that.

[TensaiSogetsu]

What you people keep ignoring is that this attack coincided with an expansion release. What is one of the ways you tell there's a DDoS attack on your network? A huge spike in traffic. What's one of the things that an expansion brings? A huge spike in traffic. This is looking for a needle in a haystack.

I just work for a national company who has systems that do occasionally have people choosing to DDoS us.

Did your company just release a highly anticipated expansion at the time of said DDoS attack? No? Then no you don't have the qualifications to make that argument. That's like saying you can drive a Semi when you drive a VW Bug. I'm not saying that the problems were 100% on a DDoS attack, alot were on SE's account, but I'm also saying 100% of the problems weren't from SE. Ya'll need to stop watching The X Files. Multiple things can happen at the same time.

[birdy_reene]

snip.

not to mention in North America, when nearly every time a major title releases a new game, or DLC it gets DDOS'ed, WoW has been targeted durning holiday events, COD gets DDOS'ed nearly every Christmas/yule. If its multiplayer and gets a lot of advertising, the running trend in North America is piss on everyones fun and DDOS it over the last 2 years

[Kosmos992k]

You know, one of the saddest things about this topic is those basically calling SE liars for reporting the problems the have experienced as a result of a DDOS attack. With a server based MMORPG that makes extensive use of instances, there are certain key systems that coordinate cross world matching and the transfer of characters from world to instance and back again. DDOS that server and you get what we've seen, do it during a launch and you mask your attack.

But the sad bit is this. Naoki Yoshida has absolutely stepped up to the mark on numerous occasions to accept blame for things that were less than perfect. I don't know about you, but I find his contrition and candor very refreshing and rare in this day and age. If the problems we've seen were their fault, SE, aka Yoshida, would step up and say so. It's sad how so many with no evidence but their own bias doubt and cry "lies" when and explanation is offered.

Grow up people, and learn what it means to carry the can for something. Yoshida would be a good, positive case study.

[RukiaFae]

And what are they going to blame PS4 launcher problem on? You know that major issue where you have to redownload the whole game again. You know the issue they ignored all weekend all long and are just now acknowledging exist. I'm sorry but they really need own up to their mistakes. DDOS attack or not they handle a lot of things poorly with this launch. No excuses.