DDoS two hours after the patch goes live is ridiculous

[Hanzz96]

I.T. professional here. I don't care what they say. It is NOT due to DDOS attacks. It is their shitty servers. It's even causing the forums to lag.

I disagree it's definitely ddos because with a VPN you don't get booted. You lag but you do not DC.

I was in M10N today and 5/8 DC'd the three who didn't weren't from NA but playing on aether through a VPN.

[PvpRaiden]

anotha one!

[TBerry]

This happens to Omega every few months or so.

[Hyperia]

At this point, it’s starting to feel like we are being punished for something…

[Hanzz96]

I feel like SE is about to realise just how important the NA player base is when they lose a lot of it

[NorthernLadMSP]

I disagree it's definitely ddos because with a VPN you don't get booted. You lag but you do not DC.

I was in M10N today and 5/8 DC'd the three who didn't weren't from NA but playing on aether through a VPN.

Do you have a VPN you recommend?

[SalamanderIX]

VPN/Tunnelers seems to help because there's a particular server in the NTT hops that is responsible.
If you somehow skip that one in routing, you might not get disconnected.

The NTT hops are ridiculous by the way. By default I get *FIVE* ntt hops, this inefficiency probably ads a ton of ping to the game regardless of ddos.

[Jeeqbit]

Which VPNs do people find to work and routing through where?

ProtonVPN routing through Arizona has worked for me sometimes but the previous DDoS that was happening a few months ago, ProtonVPN didn't work for me on that one, because the DDoS seemed more directly on the server itself as far as I could tell.

Also, I reached a point where ProtonVPN was causing disconnects and I think it's probably because SE started to filter datacenter IPs like VPNs to fight off the attacks.

[Hanzz96]

Do you have a VPN you recommend?

Exitlag. I swear by it and while I've had lag I don't get booted from the server

[Aidorouge]

At this point, it’s starting to feel like we are being punished for something…

One dumb as hell crackpot theory I've seen somebody float around is that they're trying to encourage people to transfer off the more bloated NA data servers by making the wait to get back in unbearable.

Admittedly, attempts to get back into Aether and Crystal have queues in the thousands, Primal has it in the hundreds, but Dynamis sometimes only gets as high as the 80s.

Dynamis players can quickly log back in, but there's still not enough people to make anything pop/most of them were just standing in their houses anyway. While Aether/Primal/Crystal queues are as fast as ever, but every time people get kicked out it can take several minutes to get back in (and in batches, so other party members may take longer to return).

Same person also swears that Dynamis drops out less often than the other three (with Aether and Crystal dropping out the most), but I don't know and doubt that it's true, and it doesn't change the fact that even IF Dynamis is somehow a safer harbor, it's still going down and something like this isn't going to make people suddenly start flooding into Dynamis even if its just travelers, or how it would be completely insane if Square-Enix was sabotaging their own DCs somehow because they're no longer asking, they're TELLING people to disperse.

Personally I've been traveling to Primal this whole time to get things done, so I can't personally vouch if Dynamis is going down less often, but the claim that it takes longer to get back into Aether and Crystal sounds accurate enough because they do have the highest concentration of local players and the most visitors trying to get through the doors. It's also possible that Square-Enix's own anti-transfer/traveler mechanism during "congestion" may also be having an impact because of how it tries to throttle and even block connections, and if it doesn't prioritize residents over travelers, then it becomes a free-for-all on who makes it back in first.

I do find myself curious if the DDoS have happened more or less in the past depending on the number of worlds that are labeled as congested during that time, or if these DDoS even STARTED around the same time they began blocking worlds from time to time. As far as I know Square-Enix has always rotated worlds as being congested for the sake of preventing new character creation/transfers, but it's only been in the last year that they started more directly doing things to the data centers to prevent actual connections (the Dawntrail lockdown for Dynamis, the anti-traveler blocks for Aether).

Flipping that particular switch on and off all the time may be borking something and causing general instability, because the DDoS always coincides with new patches, and what happens every patch? World congestion status changes, and that DOES literally impact who can and can not access a world/log-in priority. It may not be intentional like I said, but Square-Enix may in fact be DDoS themselves somehow with how they set it up.