Final Fantasy XI Suffers DDOS Attacks

_xeno_ writes "Final Fantasy XI is currently under a DDOS attack from unknown parties. No additional information is really available, but Square-Enix has contacted "[l]aw enforcement authorities in Japan, the United States, and Europe." The attacks started on April 9th and are evidently ongoing, causing server downtime, preventing people from logging in to the game, and causing extra latency. No word has been made on the exact nature of the attacks or any progress on blocking the attacks."

Time to switch to a different network?

[Punboy]

It seems that a large portion of the popular online games are getting their servers mutilated. is it time for them to switch to a different method of networking? perhaps create their own "internet" to "dial" into?

Re:OK, that was a nonstory

[MMaestro]

How do you know that they didn't just break their network infrastructure yet again?

Again? The game has been out for over 2 years in the US (3+ in Japan) and has run smoothly since then (don't forget its also designed for the PS2 so they have a VERY stable system). FFXI isn't Ultima Online where server problems plagued the game after two generations of MMORPGs passed it. FFXI isn't World of Warcraft where server problems can be justified (to an extent) to the 'we're just getting started, give us a chance' argument either.

If you paid attention to the server status on the PlayOnline website, you also would've noticed that some servers were randomly going down also. Non-heavily populated servers going down? Can't be an overload of players. No server patch updates recently? Can't be a lag spike. Some script kiddie decided to try to 'hack' the game? Been there, done that, hasn't crashed a server either and if they did it would've crashed ALL the servers, not just one of them (they would've also had to hack PlayOnline before they could manipulate any important data). This isn't something you can just chalk up to 'hackers getting lucky this one time' so lose the 'FFXI SUX0RZ!' attitude.