A Note from Genisaurus:
[quote="Genisaurus"]Earlier, I said this:
[quote="Genisaurus"]There's no evidence that any one particular person is the culprit. Frankly, we're still compiling evidence whether or not it's even a DDoS - most of the symptoms are the same, but there is some other unusual behavior going on that makes it hard to confirm one way or another. Communication with the one or two people who might be able to say conclusively is blocked by time zones and busy schedules.
We will let you know more as we know more.[/quote]
Well, the evidence has come in, been examined, and it's pretty clear that we are suffering a DDoS attack at the moment. Before receiving confirmation from our lovely network wizards, we were a bit in the dark: It looked like a DDoS, it walked like a DDoS, but it didn't quite quack like a DDoS.
The problems observed by players over the last few days - when it has actually been up - have been caused by slow connections to the database. This includes things like guilds appearing to lose members, auctions seeming to disappear, characters missing, etc. The information is all there, it just isn't getting loaded properly. Now, there's a chance that this slow database connection might not actually be related to the DDoS, so we're taking the opportunity to make some much-needed improvements to our backend just in case.
But the database aside, we're still experiencing incoming traffic roughly 10x higher than we usually do, and this is testing the limits of our bandwidth. In these conditions, we cannot operate. We're not going anywhere, but the server won't be able to be started until the attacks slow enough for us to accept the usual player traffic. The server will be available as the DDoS attacks slow, but expect it to be spotty and unreliable in the coming days.
We do ask that our players not spend their time speculating as to whom the culprit(s) behind these attacks may be. DDoS attacks are notoriously difficult if not impossible to trace, and as such there is absolutely no evidence for any accusations beyond conjecture and circumstance. It takes an unstable and sad person to want to DDoS a private server, but the last thing anyone wants to do is to encourage other unstable and sad individuals to try to be vigilantes in our defense.[/quote]
For more information about the status of the server, refer to this topic: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=15205
