DDoS Attacks Confirmed

[Bourne_Endeavor]

If indeed there is an ongoing DDoS not telling your customers until after 5 days have passed is pretty close to sugar coating.

Exercise in point of view and hypocrisy: would you tell your boss that he shouldn't be "bitter" just because the "piece of software he just purchased which is vital for day-to-day business" doesn't work properly?
In all likelihood you don't which makes you a hypocrite who makes an arbitrary case of "it's just a game".

No it isn't. They likely had no reason to assume a DDoS initially since they would have already anticipated congestion given the scoop of players. Could they have better prepared for it? Absolutely, but that does not signify malicious intent. Putting all that aside, the last thing you want to do when being targeted by a DDoS is draw attention to it. Making an immediate announcement only gives the hackers what they want; notoriety. Now they have even more motivation to continuously flood the same. Better you have a plan in place to thwart their attack or it'll simply get worse. And no, that is not an easy task. A good hacker can be a nightmare because you need to pinpoint exactly how they're getting in.

Lastly, no company wants to publicly acknowledge their systems were compromised. Neither Sony nor Microsoft said a word when their respective online networks went down. At least not for a while. It's fairly common practice.

[Catwho]

Huge login queues on small servers are caused by the following:

- DDoS takes out 500-1000 people from Duty Finder at a time
- All 500 people attempt to log in at once
- SE's lobby server catches them and allows them to enter 100 at a time if the world is NOT full. (Compared to Balmung, where you literally have to wait for other people to log off or crash to have a shot, so sometimes it moves at the pace of 10 per minute or less.)
- Queue should decrease by 100 every 60 seconds, which has been my experience

You'll be back in the game in 5 minutes, but if your character is still attempting to load into the instance while the DF server is borked, you'll be 90002'd right back out again. And right back into the queue, along with everyone else with the same problem.

Edit: To clarify, the queue IS deliberate. The lobby server is a deliberate bottleneck to limit the number of connections to the world server at a time. However, the queue of 5000+ is not deliberate, it is an artifact of extremely large servers that are absolutely full to the brim, with no room for any more characters.

[Jetstream_Fox]

I'm doubtful it was a DDoS, first and foremost before I transferred to EU to pass Cold Steel, I only experienced one log in que on Jenova, after that I had zero issues getting into any old content, had no latency issues, or anything that could have been impacted by the servers coming under attack, if a DDoS were happening it was the most weakest DDoS I've ever heard happening. Really this sounds like people trying to take credit for SEs lack of communication on their part as to how they were planning to address a built in bottleneck.

[Catwho]

I'm doubtful it was a DDoS, first and foremost before I transferred to EU to pass Cold Steel, I only experienced one log in que on Jenova, after that I had zero issues getting into any old content, had no latency issues, or anything that could have been impacted by the servers coming under attack, if a DDoS were happening it was the most weakest DDoS I've ever heard happening. Really this sounds like people trying to take credit for SEs lack of communication on their part as to how they were planning to address a built in bottleneck.

You weren't on last night when everyone on Primal data center was experiencing massive stretches of lag, but very few disconnects, for like an hour, before the servers finally collapsed. It was server wide and totally unrelated to anyone ISP - it was happening at the data center. That matches the effects of a DDoS pretty well.

Aside from Cold Steel, I didn't have that many issues either - on Sunday I was pretty stable. The servers tend to blow up around 10PM EST, which matches prime time hours for all time zones in NA, and if there's a DDoS going on on top of that, they just can't handle the total number of connections and fall over.

[Jetstream_Fox]

You weren't on last night when everyone on Primal data center was experiencing massive stretches of lag, but very few disconnects, for like an hour, before the servers finally collapsed. It was server wide and totally unrelated to anyone ISP - it was happening at the data center. That matches the effects of a DDoS pretty well.

Aside from Cold Steel, I didn't have that many issues either - on Sunday I was pretty stable. The servers tend to blow up around 10PM EST, which matches prime time hours for all time zones in NA, and if there's a DDoS going on on top of that, they just can't handle the total number of connections and fall over.

Well I'm on EU now if you didn't read that, but no one in my discord from Jenova has complained about any type of server lag.

[The_Profezzor87]

To be honest I hardly experienced all the issues everybody was having. I even made head way into MSQ while most people couldn't. Queue times for my server never went over 2 minutes. I still don't believe there was a ddos attack though, "sounds" like a scape goat.

[Loyheta]

I just want to play already. I get kicked usually within a minute of logging in today. If I get lucky enough to play without problems, the moment I do a dungeon I get horrible lag and usually d/c during a boss fight. I just wanted to play with my friends but it seems like I should have just pre-ordered and waited a week or two.

[NaoTenbe]

something that people aren't realizing yet, ANY internet capable device can now be hijacked to help in a ddos attack.
That being said, it's still horrendously easy to get people to click on an ad, and load a Trojan into the computer. And most people leave their machines on all the time now.
This probably was a joint effect of all new and returning people along with slight unpreparedness.

It does feel like the ball was dropped, especially for those who took time off from work to be able to play this weekend.
One of my guild members managed to get into the raubahn instance, only to have the NPCs all target her, and the allies do nothing to help remove agro or damage the foes.
She ran out of mana, and was in tears for most of the rest of the night as she was kicked out and back into que hell.

I would like to think that SE might consider a LITTLE recompensation for those of us who played during said weekend, even those of us who were back at the beginning.

[Kosmos992k]

I would like to think that SE might consider a LITTLE recompensation for those of us who played during said weekend, even those of us who were back at the beginning.

DDOS attacks are nearly impossible to prevent, and hard to defend. The scale of the attack was either intended to be, or by sheer coincidence was, just enough to be masked by the expected surge in players, but large enough and targeted enough to hamper the process of transferring to instances. It was either well planned, or an accident, but it was effective.

With respect to compensation; OK, I can get behind this. What about getting two pure white and two jet black dyes on every character on your account...as compensation for the black/white issue of being able/unable to enter the Cold Steel or In Crimson instances?

[ErikMynhier]

So many tinfoil hats. Enough to cover the worlds largest cooking sheet and make the largest batch of cookies in the world.