I have a Question about DDOS attacks

[Ilan]

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

I guess you shouldn't do anything online if you can't understand why it is impossible to prevent something like that if you are not a giant company. SE can't do ANYTHING about it when the ISP gets bombed with ddos attacks. Its like you blame the company who produced your car that you are stuck in the traffic after someone caused jams on purpose...

[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.

[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

[LuciferMink]

I've been in this game for years. I haven't seen the level of disconnects and DDoS attacks in the past as I have recently, SINCE THE DATA CENTER MOVE. I don't know what they did, but it seems the new data center is less secure than the old one. Yes, the old one had a slower ping, but that didn't bother me, I didn't notice any speed increase with the move. I'm just wondering where all our money goes, since it's sort of becoming obvious to me that they aren't keeping up with hardware and security upgrades. My friend's husband does this kind of stuff for a living, while it's difficult, this game shouldn't be subjected to these types of attacks.

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. Angel and demon outfits were on the Chinese mog station LONG before we saw it.

North American FanFest. We KNOW how quickly those tickets went. Yes, some were bought by scalpers and those who cut the line by getting the final checkout URL. But some were bought and earmarked for Japanese tourists who are partaking in a tour of the US put on by SquareEnix. You heard me. Some of the US FanFest tickets were already earmarked for Japanese tourists who are coming to the US. I don't have an issue with them coming to see the US. I really don't. But I do have a problem with the venue being so small, with such a limited number of tickets, with the North American fanbase being SO BIG, they should NOT be reserving any tickets for anyone.

Yes, it is their ISP that gets bombed, so... maybe THEY need to find a new ISP? We already know our sub money is actually put towards other game products, NOT this game's maintenance.

--Lucifer Mink

[Ilan]

I've been in this game for years. I haven't seen the level of disconnects and DDoS attacks in the past as I have recently, SINCE THE DATA CENTER MOVE. I don't know what they did, but it seems the new data center is less secure than the old one. Yes, the old one had a slower ping, but that didn't bother me, I didn't notice any speed increase with the move. I'm just wondering where all our money goes, since it's sort of becoming obvious to me that they aren't keeping up with hardware and security upgrades. My friend's husband does this kind of stuff for a living, while it's difficult, this game shouldn't be subjected to these types of attacks.

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. Angel and demon outfits were on the Chinese mog station LONG before we saw it.

North American FanFest. We KNOW how quickly those tickets went. Yes, some were bought by scalpers and those who cut the line by getting the final checkout URL. But some were bought and earmarked for Japanese tourists who are partaking in a tour of the US put on by SquareEnix. You heard me. Some of the US FanFest tickets were already earmarked for Japanese tourists who are coming to the US. I don't have an issue with them coming to see the US. I really don't. But I do have a problem with the venue being so small, with such a limited number of tickets, with the North American fanbase being SO BIG, they should NOT be reserving any tickets for anyone.

Yes, it is their ISP that gets bombed, so... maybe THEY need to find a new ISP? We already know our sub money is actually put towards other game products, NOT this game's maintenance.

--Lucifer Mink

So what can SE do if the ISP gets ddos attacks? Nothing because SE doesn't get attacked!

The angel and demon set were most likely custom made for the chinese, ya know ordered n stuff. So no wonder they had it first. We only get the stuff that the chinese ordered because the com here cried about it, so be happy that you can get it at all.

I don't know how your contracts with your ISP are but my contracts run for 1-2 years and i suppose business contracts run even longer and it can get pretty expensive if you just terminate them.

[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.

[LuciferMink]

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

[Hestzhyen]

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

The thing about DDoS attacks is that they're frighteningly effective for little investment and there's no sure-fire way to defend against them. You can slough off bogus traffic as you identify it but it's so cheap and easy to shift the source and pattern of the attacks that there is almost no point except to say "well we tried". Eventually whoever is doing this will either get bored, run out of money/infected devices, or get caught... with the first being the most likely.

SE is not a perfect company and their customer service leaves a LOT to be desired. But they legitimately can't just switch ISPs or put up a firewall to stop this- they have to play defense until the aggressor stops on their own.

As to the cash shop, who cares, it's all a waste of money anyway. If SE wants to play favourites with China/Korea then let 'em.

[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.