The MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV has been under heavy DDoS attacks for almost a month. Initially, only the European data center was affected, but later the attacks also spread to the FFXIV webpage Lodestone, customer support, and the servers of Final Fantasy XI.
What happened? October was not a good month for the developers and players of FFXIV. Since October 4th, the servers have experienced massive connection issues and crashes. These initially occurred only on European servers but later spread to the North American and Japanese regions.
Players seemed to be randomly kicked from the MMORPG and were unable to log in for a long time. However, the problem did not occur for all players simultaneously. There were also people who had no issues and were spared from the disconnects. This could change over the weeks, however.
To top it all off, most disconnects occurred during the so-called “prime time.” This refers to the time period when most players are online, typically in the evening around 6:00 PM. Particularly the raiders were affected, as they could only enter instances with fixed groups at scheduled times.
How is Square Enix responding? After the initial silence, Square has released several statements regarding the situation. The Internet providers of FFXIV are suffering from irregular DDoS attacks, which also affect the performance of FFXIV and other Square Enix services. Everything is currently being done to fend off or at least mitigate these DDoS attacks.
The director and producer of FFXIV, Naoki Yoshida, has published several messages to the players apologizing for the issues. He also explained what DDoS attacks are and why they are so difficult to combat. However, it was not stated whether players would receive compensation for the weeks of connection problems.
What is a DDoS attack? Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) is a relatively simple and therefore common type of attack on servers and data centers of various service providers. There are many different types of DDoS attacks, but most aim to overwhelm the servers and crash them through artificially created, extremely high traffic.
While DDoS was previously used more as a form of protest and vandalism, it has now been recognized as a form of cybercrime. There are websites that offer specialized DDoS services, allowing one to, for example, harm the competition or extort money from the service provider.
From Frustration to Memes
How are the players reacting? In the early days of the connection problems, there was significant discontent among the players. The connection issues often occurred in the evenings when most players are active. However, there remained hope that these were just temporary issues.
As the connection problems persisted, voices arose questioning the DDoS attacks as a reason for server issues. They suggested that this was an excuse from Square Enix to cover up the poor state of their server infrastructure. User Arg0n wrote in the official Lodestone forums:
Perhaps it is not a DDoS attack, but that the hamsters have actually starved.
The EU servers have been unstable for months, especially the instance servers.
So there is a server problem regardless, DDoS or not…
There are also calls for Square to compensate for the long downtime. In the FFXIV forums, a user has created a petition for this.
Meanwhile, players have started creating memes about the constant connection problems and the state of the FFXIV servers. Players from the European Chaos and American Primal data centers have transferred to other servers to create new characters with humorous names like “Primalis Onfire” (Primal data center is on fire) and “Send Help”.
The English community has also created a “90002 Bingo”. Error code 90002 in FFXIV indicates a sudden loss of connection to the server. The bingo lists the worst situations during which one can be kicked out, such as in the middle of a raid or while crafting an expensive item.
The descriptions of the official FFXIV subreddit have also been adapted to fit the situation:
The attacks continue: The attacks and connection problems have now practically become a daily occurrence for FFXIV players. Although their frequency has clearly decreased, they still occur. It is not known when the problem will be definitively resolved.
In the meantime, the FFXIV team is still working on new content:
Final Fantasy XIV is getting a new Eureka area where everything is different
