devtrackers.gg
10 months
ago -
Talion
-
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Hello Adventurers,
This was quite an intense weekend. A weekend that, unfortunately, was nowhere near as smooth as anyone would have hoped and that fell short of the frictionless experience we want to deliver for our players.
The DDoS Situation
Let’s start with the most obvious thing: the ongoing DDoS attacks. Throughout the weekend, we saw a number of DDoS attacks against several parts of our infrastructure. The good news is that we, in cooperation with our server host, could react quickly each time and managed to stop individual attacks. The bad news is that, since the attacker is extremely dedicated and creative in their efforts, it is likely to take some more time to fully prevent them from having any impact on Albion Online’s systems. We and our server host are working tirelessly on proper solutions for healing the frustrating situation. We are committed to overcoming this problem as soon as we can.
However, we are still in for a bit of a bumpy ride. We are of course aware of the negative impact these DDoS attacks have on your game enjoyment. As mentioned in the last statement, we are going to be compensating for the intermittent outages. We will wait until the current issues have subsided, though, so we know what a reasonable compensation might look like.
The attacks over the past days had some additional side-effects.
Daily Maintenance Sunday / Out-of-Schedule Chest Spawns
On Saturday, the DDoS attacks on Albion West overloaded a few machines in our server cluster, which led to some zones effectively crashing. To remedy that, we pulled the daily maintenance to an earlier time frame, so everything would properly reboot. An unintended side-effect resulted in the skipping of the daily maintenance on Sunday, and an out-of-schedule double spawning of chests in the game. The spawning schedule should be remedied after today’s (Monday) daily maintenance.
iOS Payment Issues
And since all good - or in this case, bad - things come in threes, an issue with purchases via iOS payments arose over the weekend. Purchases on iOS were not completed successfully for some time, and were stuck on a pending status in the Apple App Store purchasing interface. We have applied a fix, and outstanding transactions should now have been delivered. If there are still open questions, please contact Customer Support.
What You Can Do
Since we have seen a number of “What can I, as a player, do?” over the weekend, here are a few things:
While this has been one of the less-pleasant weekends in the past months, there are a lot of things that make us look optimistically to the future.
The DDoS attacks get more creative, and use more bandwidth, to have an impact. The attacker has to try new things every time they attempt to disrupt us, as our server host closes attack vectors. That means we, in cooperation with our server host, are on the right track.
We have a BattlEye integration currently in testing that will hopefully be another thorn in the side of those causing the botting, and likely also the DDoS-, problem.
And lastly, but most importantly for us, we have received a huge outpouring of support from you, our loyal players.
This support only strengthens our resolve even more not to let up in this fight. As said before: it’s a marathon, not a sprint. And we will be the one coming out ahead.
Thank you again for your support, loyalty, and words of encouragement which motivate the whole team. All this makes the struggle worthwhile.
-Talion
This was quite an intense weekend. A weekend that, unfortunately, was nowhere near as smooth as anyone would have hoped and that fell short of the frictionless experience we want to deliver for our players.
The DDoS Situation
Let’s start with the most obvious thing: the ongoing DDoS attacks. Throughout the weekend, we saw a number of DDoS attacks against several parts of our infrastructure. The good news is that we, in cooperation with our server host, could react quickly each time and managed to stop individual attacks. The bad news is that, since the attacker is extremely dedicated and creative in their efforts, it is likely to take some more time to fully prevent them from having any impact on Albion Online’s systems. We and our server host are working tirelessly on proper solutions for healing the frustrating situation. We are committed to overcoming this problem as soon as we can.
However, we are still in for a bit of a bumpy ride. We are of course aware of the negative impact these DDoS attacks have on your game enjoyment. As mentioned in the last statement, we are going to be compensating for the intermittent outages. We will wait until the current issues have subsided, though, so we know what a reasonable compensation might look like.
The attacks over the past days had some additional side-effects.
Daily Maintenance Sunday / Out-of-Schedule Chest Spawns
On Saturday, the DDoS attacks on Albion West overloaded a few machines in our server cluster, which led to some zones effectively crashing. To remedy that, we pulled the daily maintenance to an earlier time frame, so everything would properly reboot. An unintended side-effect resulted in the skipping of the daily maintenance on Sunday, and an out-of-schedule double spawning of chests in the game. The spawning schedule should be remedied after today’s (Monday) daily maintenance.
iOS Payment Issues
And since all good - or in this case, bad - things come in threes, an issue with purchases via iOS payments arose over the weekend. Purchases on iOS were not completed successfully for some time, and were stuck on a pending status in the Apple App Store purchasing interface. We have applied a fix, and outstanding transactions should now have been delivered. If there are still open questions, please contact Customer Support.
What You Can Do
Since we have seen a number of “What can I, as a player, do?” over the weekend, here are a few things:
- Don’t buy currency or in-game items from 3rd parties. This finances them and, by extension, also DDoS attacks.
- Keep reporting Bots you see in the open world. They are by and large part of those big RMT operations and supply Silver to aforementioned 3rd parties.
- In case of an ongoing attack, don’t message support about it. We appreciate you wanting to make us aware. However, our warning systems alert us within minutes. Temporary side-effects from connection interruptions like Premium or Vanity not displaying will recover automatically. As mentioned before, compensation for the ongoing situation will happen on a global scale.
While this has been one of the less-pleasant weekends in the past months, there are a lot of things that make us look optimistically to the future.
The DDoS attacks get more creative, and use more bandwidth, to have an impact. The attacker has to try new things every time they attempt to disrupt us, as our server host closes attack vectors. That means we, in cooperation with our server host, are on the right track.
We have a BattlEye integration currently in testing that will hopefully be another thorn in the side of those causing the botting, and likely also the DDoS-, problem.
And lastly, but most importantly for us, we have received a huge outpouring of support from you, our loyal players.
This support only strengthens our resolve even more not to let up in this fight. As said before: it’s a marathon, not a sprint. And we will be the one coming out ahead.
Thank you again for your support, loyalty, and words of encouragement which motivate the whole team. All this makes the struggle worthwhile.
-Talion