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OriginalTibs, on 11 August 2014 - 05:02 AM, said:
The problem may not be under PGI's control. They may be unable to say anything due to restrictions imposed by investigation or potential litigation if they are seeking or have identified whoever may be executing (for example) a limited DOS campaign hoping for a payoff.
Unlikely. A sane network setup would have the routing tables adjusted on-demand. I.e. only clients which are actually scheduled to some game server can send messages to that game server. In such a case, a distributed attack simply would not work (as scheduling to the game servers is done by PGI). A non-distributed attack, however should be easy to fight (especially since the attacker needs to be a logged-in player).
My suspicion: The bug existed for a while. Earlier, players affected have been disconnected, i.e. the server was capable to adapt (in a sensible way from the server-side PoV). Now the disconnection mechanic was removed (remember the "you should see no more 0-ping discos anymore" note?). I assume, every player is handled by some thread/process server-side. These have to be synced (i.e. they have to be updated with the latest server state and asked for their latest client state). When one of these threads/processes becomes laggy, now it slows down the whole game and maybe even the whole server. We don't know why they get laggy and maybe it is not one single cause, but the symptom of the whole game freezing looks a lot like someone simply removed a timeout.
