I mean, last year was probably one of the worst years for FAF in terms of Internet connection stability. and now the situation is only getting worse, I tried to hold several tournaments and in each of them I encountered huge problems with the connection, the last tournament had to be postponed by 20 days. Can you at least somehow justify what is happening? We are losing players, online is decreasing, we need to do something with that, at least just explain what the problem is please.
What is going on with FAF?
The root cause is that last year someone started launching DDOS attack against FAF infrastructure. We had to implement significant changes to mitigate them. That's why originally nobody could even log in, after that nobody could see hosted games. We fixed these issues, but the connections during the game are still the weak link if they need to use a relay server, as that one can be overloaded by DDOS.
I suspect that the attacker is targeting your tournaments now, as it seemed to be quiet for a while but today people reported a lot of connection issues.
We tried using a professional provider of ICE relay servers, to improve relayed connections, but I am not sure what the latest status there is. One of the server admins would have to comment on that.
We are all aware that we are losing players over this, but it is not a straightforward fix.
Yes, this 100% happens during prime time or during major events, for example my latest tournaments, I receive messages from ddosers on the stream about the faf finally dying and all the players moving to other servers.
We enabled the connection to our bought-in turn servers again yesterday evening, which should help alleviate the connection problems.
They were disabled previously because we had to do some changes in our infrastructure to properly integrate them. With the server maintenance two days ago these got deployed, so we could enable them again.
How does the hacker know what to attack? SupCom is pier-to-pier. Can't players just connect to each other without your vulnerable nodes? Ignore me if I am talking nonsense.
Many people can, but those that can't establish a direct connection need to use relay servers. These relay servers are known to the attacker because they need to be broadcasted to every player in case they need them. If the attacker then floods these relay servers, the legit connections over these servers degrade and manifest as lag in the game.
In a perfect world we wouldn't need these relay servers at all, but because the internet is a network of network it can be difficult to route through these network boundaries. People have all sorts of ways to connect to the internet. Through the physical cable in their house, their phone, starlink...
Because we banned them for misbehavior and this is the reaction.
"Nerds have a really complicated relationship with change: Change is awesome when WE'RE the ones doing it. As soon as change is coming from outside of us it becomes untrustworthy and it threatens what we think of is the familiar."
– Benno Rice
So is it known who the individual(s) performing ddos attacks are? Have they also set up their own faf servers or are they entirely different groups?
@brutus5000 My point of view is that it's not just because of the ban. I think it's about the rottenness of people and the thirst for profit, I assume that they expect and hope that people will move from the faf to their created servers (and if you call a spade a spade, it's just a stolen idea of a "faf server"). And if people switch to them, then there will be donations. Such "people" will sell their Mother for money.... I do not see any other meaning of DDOS attacks (here a person loves the game and cannot play it, because there are technical failures, and "unexpectedly" there is an alternative, of course this player will go to play where there is an opportunity ...).I repeat, this is my personal opinion
I think I'm about ready for a break. Besides playing like absolute dogshit lately, the connection issues returned are just making the game nearly completely unenjoyable once again. I find myself spending more time in lobbys and incomplete games than actually playing these days.
For your enjoyment, not even sure wtf is happening here:
https://streamable.com/qr1mg6
I haven't had any issues personally, though I'm in the US playing with others in the US, is this an international problem? I'm not seeing it.
@tankenabard Interesting. I am in Russia, and I have these problems. What if only relays close to Russia are under attack?