After some healthy discussion on Discord, a small FAQ that I'll update over time. Feel free to ask me questions either via the forums or via Discord. I unfortunately do not have all the answers though.
Did it really start two years ago? And consistently over time?
Yes, see for example these two announcements from 2023:
https://forum.faforever.com/topic/6680/ddos-update
https://forum.faforever.com/topic/6182/addressing-severe-connectivity-issues-what-has-happened
And in general the server status page on Discord. Not all events are related to the malicious actors. Sometimes we just wrote an innocent bug. Or scheduled maintenance. But especially before we had Cloudflare, if a service went down ten times a day then that was not because we thought it would be nice to turn it off and on again .
Initially our infrastructure was the primary target. Especially around tournament days. Individuals streamers have been a consistent target for more than a year. See for example the frustration shared here:
https://forum.faforever.com/topic/9440/ddos-and-now-something-new-again/28
Do we know anything about motives?
Yes and no. I mean the fact that it's been on going consistently for two years speaks chapters about their intentions.
There have been occasionally some sort of talk between representatives of FAForever and someone who claims to be (one of) the attackers. But there's no way for us to verify this. Therefore I'm uncomfortable with sharing details of these talks.
Do you have a link to the mentioned YouTube video and/or the Discord server?
Unfortunately I reported the YouTube video and it got removed accordingly. I did not keep a recording of it. I also am not part of the Discord server that I mentioned. It was shown in the video. I've seen temporary Discord invites. Perhaps a screenshot. But it's impossible for me to verify a screenshot.
I suppose it is nice to know that the report button on YouTube is, occasionally, somewhat functional.
And yes, I could've done some rickrolling there but I did not. Even though the sentiment of the song suits the announcement in some fashion.
Would more donations help?
All donations are appreciated. But what we need can not be fixed with more funding. @Brutus5000 wrote a blog post about it in 2021:
https://forum.faforever.com/topic/2413/the-complexity-of-the-faf-infrastructure-and-why-throwing-money-at-it-doesn-t-fix-shit/1
What we need are more contributors that are intrinsically motivated to help FAForever thrive. And specifically, experienced software developers that want to stick around for a while to help maintain the software and infrastructure of FAForever.
