For the past 16-17 months we've collectively as a playerbase had intermittent issues connecting to the NA data centers.
Initially the "attacks" seemed to take the form of the login server(s) getting crushed until they restarted and everyone needing to hang out in a queue after they came back up. This shifted over time to being able to reconnect immediately with some regularity (and most recently to being able to reconnect quickly, then the game disconnecting you and placing you in a 1200-deep queue 5 minutes afterwards. maybe a route failover being detected as a second connection?), which seems to have led to the theory that the attacks have shifted from the game/login servers to upstream network route nodes. I've heard theories that this is an issue with the NTT network, or not targeting the game, or that Square signed an exclusive contract with NTT disallowing them from having alternative routes or providers to fail over to.
We've been having issues every content release and near many holidays, generally with increasing frequency. The past week has seen near constant "attacks" landing multiple times per day. Again, this has been happening at least roughly since Dawntrail released, which was July 2, 2024.
Every so often there will be a lodestone post noting a DDOS attack is causing network difficulty. 7.4 included an update to make 'deep-dungeon' slightly less likely to wipe your save in response to losing your connection, but otherwise from a player perspective there doesn't seem to be any acknowledgement that the NA data centers are becoming unusable for some types of content. The SEA region Materia data center is unaffected, which is frankly the only legitimate evidence we've seen that this is 'DDOS' or 'attack' related, but it's unlikely that everyone can simply D/C travel to Materia for all play.
Right now any kind of crafting activity has a reasonable chance of destroying your (sometimes rare) materials. Deep Dungeons and Field Operations have significantly steeper death penalties compared to the normal FFXIV gameplay loop, so Materia has seen a bunch of NA players hiding out so they can try the new Occult Crescent jobs without getting knocked offline and de-leveled every few CEs (I'm one of them!). I'd really love to continue exploring Eureka which I'd just gone back and started, but I don't dare set foot in there right now. The savage raiders I know are getting increasingly concerned about the upcoming arcadion heavyweight tier, given how many attempts will certainly be ended by disconnects.
With basic metrics and tracking I would assume Square/CBU3 could see every wave of people getting kicked offline. I'm clearly frustrated and I'm trying to reign in my tone here, but I really have to ask -
What's being done about this issue? Why is it only getting worse over time?
For basically any other online service this failure rate would be considered unacceptable, so I have to imagine people are considering whether or not to continue their subscription when they can't reliably play the game. The lack of communication and transparency isn't helping. Other games don't have this problem at this scale - maybe they see attacks, but they certainly aren't this effective for this long.
Please tell us what's going on and what's being done.
Continue reading...
Initially the "attacks" seemed to take the form of the login server(s) getting crushed until they restarted and everyone needing to hang out in a queue after they came back up. This shifted over time to being able to reconnect immediately with some regularity (and most recently to being able to reconnect quickly, then the game disconnecting you and placing you in a 1200-deep queue 5 minutes afterwards. maybe a route failover being detected as a second connection?), which seems to have led to the theory that the attacks have shifted from the game/login servers to upstream network route nodes. I've heard theories that this is an issue with the NTT network, or not targeting the game, or that Square signed an exclusive contract with NTT disallowing them from having alternative routes or providers to fail over to.
We've been having issues every content release and near many holidays, generally with increasing frequency. The past week has seen near constant "attacks" landing multiple times per day. Again, this has been happening at least roughly since Dawntrail released, which was July 2, 2024.
Every so often there will be a lodestone post noting a DDOS attack is causing network difficulty. 7.4 included an update to make 'deep-dungeon' slightly less likely to wipe your save in response to losing your connection, but otherwise from a player perspective there doesn't seem to be any acknowledgement that the NA data centers are becoming unusable for some types of content. The SEA region Materia data center is unaffected, which is frankly the only legitimate evidence we've seen that this is 'DDOS' or 'attack' related, but it's unlikely that everyone can simply D/C travel to Materia for all play.
Right now any kind of crafting activity has a reasonable chance of destroying your (sometimes rare) materials. Deep Dungeons and Field Operations have significantly steeper death penalties compared to the normal FFXIV gameplay loop, so Materia has seen a bunch of NA players hiding out so they can try the new Occult Crescent jobs without getting knocked offline and de-leveled every few CEs (I'm one of them!). I'd really love to continue exploring Eureka which I'd just gone back and started, but I don't dare set foot in there right now. The savage raiders I know are getting increasingly concerned about the upcoming arcadion heavyweight tier, given how many attempts will certainly be ended by disconnects.
With basic metrics and tracking I would assume Square/CBU3 could see every wave of people getting kicked offline. I'm clearly frustrated and I'm trying to reign in my tone here, but I really have to ask -
What's being done about this issue? Why is it only getting worse over time?
For basically any other online service this failure rate would be considered unacceptable, so I have to imagine people are considering whether or not to continue their subscription when they can't reliably play the game. The lack of communication and transparency isn't helping. Other games don't have this problem at this scale - maybe they see attacks, but they certainly aren't this effective for this long.
Please tell us what's going on and what's being done.
Continue reading...