Over the weekend, Final Fantasy 14: Stormblood opened its doors to players as part of an early access session— but unfortunately, technical issues marred the experience for many. Now, Square Enix has offered some insight into what caused the outages.
Apparently, the problems plaguing Final Fantasy 14 weren't caused by the game itself, or the hardware setup that the studio has implemented to underpin the MMO. Instead, they were the work of an as-yet-unidentified group who decided to stage a DDoS attack on the game just as players were flocking to try the expansion out for themselves.
"We have confirmed that since Jun. 16th, we have been experiencing DDoS attacks from an anonymous third-party targeting the Final Fantasy 14 game servers on the NA data center," read a statement issued by the company. "Our technical staff is taking every possible measure to address this issue but the attack is still continuing to take place by changing their methods at every moment. We will continue to monitor and work on recovery from every possible angle."
The attackers are targeting the game by sending phony requests to its servers, putting a huge amount of stress on Square Enix's infrastructure. This is why players may have experienced incredibly long wait times as they attempted to log in over the weekend ahead of the expansion's official launch.
However, the studio does have some good news for players — while the attackers' efforts seem to be ongoing, there's no chance that their hard earned character progression will be affected. The strategy being employed can easily cause outages, but it shouldn't offer access to players' accounts, or their personal information.
Square Enix has certainly been going all-out to promote Final Fantasy 14 recently, so this situation will no doubt be very frustrating. That said, the problem is being addressed as we speak, so hopefully the game will be accessible as normal sooner rather than later.
Final Fantasy 14: Stormblood is available now for the PC and PlayStation 4.
Source: Final Fantasy 14