Connection instabillity
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The game seems very unstable since the last patch. First the Client had a bug (2025.5.1) and then the new one (2025.5.2.) seems to work but most games (I don't think I exaggerate) break down due to connection issues. It seems to happen more often in custom games.
I don's know the reason behind it and don't understand anything of the technology but I just want to point out it's going on for a while now and people are really starting to get frustrated, calling the game "lobby simulator" and such.
I appreciate all the great work that the Dev Team is doing for keeping this game up to date and alive but this issue needs to be addressed fast. There are evenings now where it takes hours to get to play a game from start to finish due to all the connection issues.
I guess these issues are no news for many but I just felt the magnitude of the current problem had to be stressed.
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If we hadn't addressed issues fast you wouldn't be able to post your issues in this forum. Also you are throwing a lot of things together that need to be separated.
When the first DDoS wave in November 2023 hit us we had to restructure lots of things in a very short time to make FAF work at all. We are talking about changing that would haven taken months in regular companies that we did within 2 weeks. Still then we had plenty of issues going especially with connectivity due to our Coturn servers being killed by DDoS. For that we found a partial solution too with the Global coturn.
When the more sophisticated 2nd DDoS wave hit us this year we had to restructure even more things. Hence we rushed a few things and even pushed out a broken client update (2025.5.1) that was only available for a few hours. Then it was replaced with a fixed version 2025.5.2. If this isn't fast then I don't know what you expect. Then over time we fixed more and more things like the Newshub again.
This is client and infrastructure. Then there is game patches. A different team with different problems (less of a manpower problem, more of a difficult-to-test problem). There things went very chaotic on the last patch day (but game patch day always has been a meme in FAF for the last decade).
The last part is connectivity with in particular ICE adapter. Of course we know the problems. And I am working on this topic for almost 3 years now (see e.g. my first blog post on the topic here). But things don't always work out the way you want to and even after initial success (blog), I was steering myself into a dead end and started with a new approach. This new approach by the way is currently in testing. And the first larger test was a bummer and failed on all Windows machines. So we see, rushing here doesn't solve problems either.
This topic could have been much much further if we wouldn't have been busy fending of DDoS attacks for months (basically getting nothing else done).
Also telling me to rush things will have more of the opposite effect. I have a full time job, I have a family. I don't want to spend all of my free time on FAF anymore. We have asked for help multiple times. People showed up, consumed a lot of my time and then disappeared again without contributing anything. I am no longer pursuing this approach.
Apart from the game team nothing moves fast in FAF anymore. The glorious time where connectivity was working and multiple devs where putting in 20-40 hours per week are long gone...
He said, "I've been to the year 3000
Not much has changed, but they live underwater
And your great-great-great-granddaughter
Is playin' FAF, playin' FAF" -
Like I said, I don't understand anything about the technology that is required to run this thing and I appreciate all the work that has been put in it. I was just describing the current situation and the feedback of the players and I didn't "tell" you to rush things. I wasn't even aware that you are the only one working on this.
You are absolutely right, the glory days are probably over, people get older, have families etc. and no time left to invest in complicated hobby like this. I didn't mean to offend anyone.
There were some suggestions within the community to maybe "hire" some professional contractors who could help solve these issues if the manpower and/or time is an issue. Although the glory days are over FAF still seems to have a strong core and maybe a financing model with a monthly membership fee for regular users could be implemented if that would solve the problem of the capacity needed to tackle these ongoing DDoS attacks or help you develop the client further. I don't know, I am just trying to help find solutions.
By the way, where are these DDoS attacks coming from? And is there any clue who or why they are attacking FAF?
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@Thomy100 said in Connection instabillity:
There are evenings now where it takes hours to get to play a game from start to finish due to all the connection issues.
I believe this could be a separate issue on a players' connection. If you have such an incident again, please share the logs to narrow down the issue.
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@Brutus5000 Thank you for your great work.
I hope the path you have chosen brings a solution for you and everyone involved. 
