It seems not everyone is thrilled about the current state of Final Fantasy 14, as the MMORPG has been suffering a series of DDoS attacks (distributed denial of service). These attacks were addressed in a Letter from the Producer Live, known as the “Live Letter,” by lead director and producer Naoki Yoshida.
There have been several Lodestone posts acknowledging the ongoing issues, though none as substantial as this.
According to Yoshida, there’s a dedicated infrastructure security team that already works around the clock, including rotating shifts, locking down on their efforts to ward off the attacks. The team has also tapped third-party vendors in order to try to mitigate it.
Yoshida counts his blessings, though, that nothing critical has been affected by the ongoing attacks.
These attacks have been ongoing since about May 5 or 6th, which have resulted in mass simultaneous disconnects. It’s an issue for many players, given that in-game instanced “duties” continue to play out despite any player disconnects, causing those players to often die mid-battle.
In case you need a recap: DDoS attacks occur when someone or multiple people attack a single Internet target by overwhelming it with access attempts, or any kind of data input, so that it can’t process anything in a timely manner. Think of it like a faucet that lets out water too fast for its drain, or multiple people dumping literal buckets of water into that sink so that the faucet can’t drain its own supply.
In short, someone’s trying to overtake FFXIV with excess data so players can’t access it consistently. Unfortunately, the attacks do seem to be working well enough that it needs to be explicitly addressed by the game director. Back in the old DDoS glory days of 2008-2012 or so that invoked the creation of services such as CloudFlare, we’d at least have a known reason for it from attackers, but the motivations are unclear at the moment.
Hopefully, these will be managed by the time Dawntrail releases at the end of June, especially for players trying to catch up before the expansion.
That said, Yoshida notes the contradictory simplicity of these attacks, as he explains that modern DDoS attacks are often carried about by allegedly-hacked computers from around the world. Protect your data and learn to look for phishing, folks!
