I have a Question about DDOS attacks

[YukinoAmidala]

FFXIV as a service is operating fine, the DDoS attacks are affecting your ability to route to the ISP's that then route you to the servers which is causing disconnections.

[Dustytome]

I guess I shouldnt pay for a service they cant insure.

Consider the internet like a highway. Your connection to the servers is a car going back and forth on that highway. SE doesn't really control that highway until you're right to their building. For the most part it's smooth sailing for your car heading back and forth, but then a DDOS happens. A DDOS is like someone controlling thousands of other cars (signals from other computers that have been taken over by malware usually) and sending them to one location. Traffic immediately slows to a stop, it can take forever to get by and it causes the drive to take long enough that the car isn't delivering/receiving information quickly enough which is when a disconnect occurs. Attempts are made to filter the traffic, but it's often difficult to separate good traffic from bad traffic and there's so much of it to filter through that it can be near impossible to keep up.

Some companies mitigate this issue by having multiple locations so if traffic is backed up, you can be redirected to a new locations. This is very costly and personally I think it's just too much data changing on a consistent basis for a game to pull off without gameplay being affected in a negative manner.

[BristolRuss]

Ya say google or amazon type infrastructure.... well, SquareEnix, I'm pretty sure, has a good one in Japan. We've already seen how they favor the Japanese, Korean, and Chinese players over the US players. An earthquake hits and a small part of Japan is in trouble? Oh, housing demo is paused. Wild fires are ALL OVER the North American continent? Naw, we ain't pausin that.

https://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...72b3fc4087f863

A hurricane hits a tiny amount of states and housing demo gets suspended, so don't even try pulling that. Bunch of entitled weenies these days.

[Jib]

Talking different things here. DDoS attacks is one thing, SE preference for Asia is another. We all know SE prefers Europe the least. We get nothing or when we get it is always late or very difficult ways to obtain.

DDoS attack has been happening to everyone, Asia, America, Europe... it sucks, just have to be patient I guess, it won’t happen forever. Talk with your wallet. Cancel subscription if you don’t want to wait, come back when you hear it is better. But one thing I will tell you, FFXIV has been the most “stable” mmorpg I have ever played. I’ve had issues with SWTOR, WOW, ESO, Blackdesert...

It happens, it will get better.

[TimeraiderGaranyi]

I guess I shouldnt pay for a service they cant insure.

As a person who gets paid IRL for IT business and especially remote and managed services... that comment is laughable.
If you think there is ANY service that works as intended 100% of the time, you need to shout it out to everyone else because at that point... you have found the holy grail

[LineageRazor]

But, my main point is: I know their ISP is getting attacked. If their ISP can't keep their own stuff secure, then SE should CHANGE THEIR ISP. When the company that my old store's point of sale system went through changed a policy, making it more difficult to process a credit card charge, we didn't just sit on it and tell our VERY ANGRY customers "It's not our fault". WE CHANGED OUR PROVIDER! Yeah, it was a learning curve, but we did it, and we were GLAD we did.

I'm not sure what you mean by keeping stuff secure. There's no way to "secure" against a DDOS attack, other than by having such a ridiculously massive infrastructure that you can process ALL of the incoming messages. There's no way to tell the difference between incoming DDOS messages and legitimate customer messages - they all need to be processed. This is why entities like Google and Amazon are pretty much the only institutions in the world that are pointless to DDOS. They're built from the ground up to handle a level of traffic that makes a DDOS attack look like a trickle.

For a companies like Sony or SE to be DDOS-proof, they'd need lots of hardware, expensive both to acquire and to maintain, that would be totally pointless 99% of the time. It's wasted space unless they're actively under attack, and since attacks are rare, it's an extremely poor investment. Bear in mind, too, that WE would be the ones paying for all this mostly-useless hardware; subscriptions would skyrocket in price. And worse, all that infrastructure is pointless if the DDOS strikes someplace out of their reach. If the targets are not SE themselves, but some other place on the route between the data center and your computer, there's nothing SE can do even if they're equipped to deal with DDOS themselves.

No, right now there's just one method for dealing with DDOS, and that's to wait for it to blow over. So far, it's worked without fail; no DDOS-er keeps it up forever. The best you as a player can do is promise yourself that if you ever meet a DDOS-er in person, you'll punch them in the face.

[Astarotha]

also every time they ban bot and gilfarmer accounts thats an extra set of logins crashing into the server constantly on top of the people pulling off ddos attacks from starbucks, libraries, the truck stop bathroom off i95, every old persons pc that clicks on every email they get, and then you get to the people actually playing the game and all their traffic

ddos is literally the popoto chip of the hacking world, theyre cheap, easy to find, and crunch all you want theyll make more

[Kirsten_Rev]

Is this the players fault or a SE thing? See I'm a paying customer like everyone else that plays this game. I was kicked out of Place of the dead floor 172 during this attack. Where we was told we got killed before we was kicked out which was bogus. I've been looking at several posts. Seems like you got crafters losing mats. Seems to me like players are being given the brush off. Now it seems like the only time SE acts like they care is when a huge chunk of the player base talks about quiting. Example like the housing issues a few patches back. Do we always have to moblize the player base just for you to see us? I wasted 8 hrs in potd for a item to give my gf. We didnt fail. The server did! How is this fair? I pay 30 dollars a month to get the brush off? The players that was in there represent close to $100 a month not counting mogstation item buys. If ddos attacks arent the players fault you have failed your player base and something needs to be done! More then we are "Trying to fix the problem." A concern and not happy player

DDoS attacks cannot be perfectly defended against, and are the result of third-party actions. They're not the player's fault, nor are they SE's fault.

That said, one thing that gets missed a lot is that SE has made XIV particularly vulnerable to them. There are a number of ways in which disconnects are more harmful or inconvenient than they need to be for players (certain content like PotD or Uznair will simply kick you out and cost you your progress; being mid-craft will cost you the materials; the game client will often kick you all the way out to the desktop instead of simply returning to the login screen). The error codes that players get when the servers are being hit are unhelpful, and have spawned countless threads about what's causing the issue, with many 'solutions' suggested that incline people to think it's a client-side issue (just why does an HTTPS System Error show up when the login server is down, for instance?). It's brutally clear they never considered the possibility of DDoS attacks when building the game client.

I'd be stunned if this general lack of consideration didn't extend to the server architecture, too, which is almost certainly placing them at unnecessarily high levels of risk. So there's that.

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All that said, seeking to assign blame for DDoS attacks really misses the point, in my estimation. The core issue is that SE is a company providing a product, a product which is not working properly, resulting in upset customers. Regardless of why the product isn't working, if it starts leading to player retention issues, it's in SE's interest to do what it can to mollify the affected players. It's not that they're obligated to, nor that they're at fault and should be made to atone - it's that they're a business, and at the end of the day, they need people to stay subscribed. At a certain point, you eat the cost and lay the groundwork for handling the situation better in the future.

[RitsukoSonoda]

Well if you want anyone to legitimately blame for DDoS attacks...
1. the person or persons that initiated it.
2. people that do not maintain a secure computer by keeping their OS and security software up to date while foolishly downloading things they shouldn't be or visit websites they shouldn't be. DDoS attacks are often executed by computers that have downloaded unwanted software the user isn't aware of.

[Sigma-Astra]

Yeah, and they're getting the WHALE mount first. They got the Red Hare mount first as well. The market for Mog Station ALWAYS goes: Asian market > NA market > EU market. The Cloud mount didn't hit EU till a FULL YEAR after we got it. So yes, SquareEnix FAVORS the Asian Market.

But, my main point is: I know their ISP is getting attacked. If their ISP can't keep their own stuff secure, then SE should CHANGE THEIR ISP. When the company that my old store's point of sale system went through changed a policy, making it more difficult to process a credit card charge, we didn't just sit on it and tell our VERY ANGRY customers "It's not our fault". WE CHANGED OUR PROVIDER! Yeah, it was a learning curve, but we did it, and we were GLAD we did.

There are things they can do.

--Lucifer

I'm not sure that you understand DDoS attacks nor do you understand that the Cash Shop items you're griping about were made EXCLUSIVELY FIRST for China and Korea by their own request. The only reasoning as to why we were given them was because the NA and EU community made tons of requests for them.

And yes, while I won't lie and say that they don't favor their own culture first, I believe you're just lashing out words for the sake of it and not really thinking clearly in what you gripe or write about.