Unable to Level up or Complete Atlas in Standard as Game Is Too Hard
" I've heard some murmuring that there have been periodic DDoS attacks flying around since last year; I'm not sure whether there's any truth to those rumours. I hold GGG responsible. It is they that operate the service; there has yet to be any obvious indications (such as claims made by them) that they've made literally any effort whatsoever to tackle the issue; according to forum posts this has been going on since last year. When players in Africa were - understandably - requesting local servers and GGG's usual hosting provider didn't have any data centers on the continent, it didn't appear to be especially difficult for them to provision resources from an alternative provider and post publicly on the forum that there was an experimental South African realm players could help test. In fact, I very much got the impression this was something of a side-project for one individual staff member. If GGG's usual provider has been unreliable for half a calendar year there comes a point when it's time to consider other options. That doesn't necessarily entail ditching that provider entirely; just being open to continuing previous efforts to be less dependent upon them. I don't blame GGG directly for any DDoS attacks they or their partners are subjected to; nor do I blame them directly for any issues (e.g. power outages) the data centres they utilise may experience. I do blame them when half a year has gone by and they have done nothing. GGG made an after-tax profit of $28.3 million for the 2022-2023 year. This was considered a disaster given it had been $48.9 million the previous year. It would cost thousands to spin up servers in an additional data center in Europe. Other gateways would see costs decrease as fewer players utilise them in favour of the new one. It would be far from a significant expenditure. For the love of god, GGG. Find some loose change in the back of the sofa. Do right by your customers. "VPs are not required to change their posting style. They are still welcome to express their opinions and take part in any discussions they wish. Their only responsibility is to continue doing what they have always done - posting in a friendly and constructive manner."
-GGG, 2015 |
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" Jonathan talked about this in the Ziz interview. According to him, DDoS is the reason. Not providers, not money; DDoS attacks. Sadly, the world still hasn't found out how to completely defend server infrastructure against DDoS attacks. It's not only GGG and PoE servers that are being affected by this. I blame GGG for a LOT(!) of things, but I struggle to hold them solely responsible for this situation. |
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" The post you partially quoted focuses on the possibility of it being down to a provider of theirs being subject to a DDoS attack and how relatively trivial it would be for them to pivot in such a scenario. I kinda get the feeling that, anything you didn’t quote, you hadn’t bothered to read. "VPs are not required to change their posting style. They are still welcome to express their opinions and take part in any discussions they wish. Their only responsibility is to continue doing what they have always done - posting in a friendly and constructive manner."
-GGG, 2015 |
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" I read it, I just disagree that it would be "trivial" to do anything about, seeing as this is affecting a lot of game servers spread over different data centers all over Europe. I may very well be wrong here, but so may you. And frankly, we don't really know if GGG have done anything, something or nothing. I'm no server infrastructure expert, and I don't even know what can be done about repeated DDoS attacks. You clearly do, as you're calling it "trivial to pivot"... Pivot to where? I get the frustration, I do. But as we see X, Blizzard, ARK Survival servers, Universities, Minecraft and more are or have been struggling with a 140% increase in DDoS attacks all over EU since last year, I don't think the "fix" is as trivial as you think. |
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(Disclaimer: All of the below is written based on the premise that the issue is caused by DDoS attacks impacting GGG's hosting provider. I don't know whether this is accurate.)
" I would estimate it would take in the region of 2 - 4 hours to look over metrics for the different gateways on an affected continent and work with the community team to prepare an accessible overview of the situation to post on the forum, so that the players could at least see which gateways are most / least affected and try to make decisions based on that information. Apparently in the last 150+ days, nobody at GGG has cared enough to do that much. It would indisputably take far less than an hour¹ to add a warning to the sign in screen that they're monitoring disruption and that their usual policy of not restoring dead Hardcore characters continues to be in effect. They've not cared enough to do that, either. ¹ I'm referring to man-hours spent on implementation. Actually testing and getting a patch out the door to effect such would, of course, take appreciably longer. " Other data centres. :) We know they've not done this as we'd suddenly have an updated list of gateways to choose between on the game client's log in screen; the results would be immediately visible to us. Think about it. What you yourself have said is that other game studios have been impacted. It's clearly not some kind of anti-GGG rage thing that would follow them around; they just happen to be one of the companies... currently... using the data centres that are affected. I'm not god's gift to networking. I don't know of a secret, magic way of thwarting DDoS attacks - least of all one that would be considered friendly to such latency-sensitive packets. But if the apartment I rent floods once, I say "that sucks" and try to recover from it. If my apartment floods every two weeks... I move. That's not being a tech wizard; that's having common sense. Let's look at the status quo. I mean, the nines are in the toilet. Any SLA worth it's salt will say "lol sorry no, DDoS attacks are exempt." And yet... there will, absolutely, be some pretty handsome discounts getting handed out. Because that's how every such cloud provider works. They are businesses designed to make a profit built on reputation; to them, nothing is more sacred than their brand. GGG's apartment keeps flooding. Their landlord says they can get, I don't know, maybe a 45% discount while the issue is happening. And GGG... don't actually live in the apartment. And they've thousands of them, not just one. And that discount sounds pretty good! "VPs are not required to change their posting style. They are still welcome to express their opinions and take part in any discussions they wish. Their only responsibility is to continue doing what they have always done - posting in a friendly and constructive manner."
-GGG, 2015 |
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I read somewhere recently that what could be mistaken for DDoS attacks may well be AI scraping/trawling bots. And being AI, it lies about what it is, obfuscates and gets past the normal bot-stoppers. Amazon's AI being the prime suspect.....
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I do not and will not use TFT. Gaming Granny :D 🐢🐢🐢🪲🪲🪲 |
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That used to be the case. These days its more commonly Australian breweries running spambots to advertise Fosters.
 "VPs are not required to change their posting style. They are still welcome to express their opinions and take part in any discussions they wish. Their only responsibility is to continue doing what they have always done - posting in a friendly and constructive manner."
-GGG, 2015 |
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Fosters isn't brewed.....it's recycled cat pee :P
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I do not and will not use TFT. Gaming Granny :D 🐢🐢🐢🪲🪲🪲 |
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" While LLM companies seem to be the end customers, there now seems to be a thriving ecosystem of developers selling DDoS as a service by integrating it into their apps and so launching it from residential addresses. Which is even more illegal than doing this for unrequested ads and spyware (that something like a quarter of mobile apps still do anyway) and is causing a much clearer harm, so I wonder how long they will be able to get off on technicalities without law enforcement stamping down on them... (What happened to Low Orbit Ion Cannon BTW ?) |
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" Handful of anons got arrested for using it; people sorta just moved on. "VPs are not required to change their posting style. They are still welcome to express their opinions and take part in any discussions they wish. Their only responsibility is to continue doing what they have always done - posting in a friendly and constructive manner."
-GGG, 2015 |
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