eurogamer.net
News by Connor Makar Staff Writer
Published on Jan. 6, 202
Final Fantasy 14 is suffering DDOS attacks on its American servers during the release of the latest Savage raid.
Final Fantasy 14 has released its latest Savage-tier raid today, pushing the game's best and brightest to race through this new challenge group content to earn powerful loot and see which region can take it down first. However, for Americans, this is proving difficult due to ongoing DDOS attacks and server outages.
With the release of patch 7.4 last month, players were welcomed back to the game with a bunch of new content to pour over. The Savage difficulty for the Heavyweight raid, which was delayed until after the holiday season, has just come out resulting in the usual rush to see which team can take it down first.
The problem comes from DDOS attacks. American players, obviously present on different servers than like-minded raiders in other regions, are facing a spree of connection issues as the servers are bombarded with digital assaults from nefarious parties. Checking the FF14 server status page, you can see a sizable portion of America servers under strain.
This has resulted in chaos for the race for world first Heavyweight Savage clears, as American teams are scrambling to contend with these extra hurdles. Players looking to temporarily hop to different servers, such as Oceania's Materia server cluster, aren't safe from these attacks either. The only way to dodge such attacks at this time appears to be a full-on server transfer to another region, which would add additional latency to play which top-end players tackling difficult content wouldn't want anyway. A messy situation.
Funnily enough, it appears as though Japanese servers are largely doing just fine during the initial release of Savage Heavyweights so far! This is both good and bad. It's good because these server outages are annoying and the less people experience them the better. It's bad because, from the perspective of competitive raiders looking to race each other to a world first clear, it adds a degree of unfairness to the mix. It takes what should be a joyful moment and sours it.
Unfortunately, this Savage raid release isn't the first time problems like these have hit Final Fantasy 14. In fact, it was only around two weeks ago when the American servers suffered several DDOS attacks. For Western FF14 players, this is a problem in desperate need of addressing, especially now that it's impacted one of the more climactic moments in the Dawntrail expansion's life cycle.
A short post on the Final Fantasy 14 website has acknowledged the problem, and states that it's being looked into. However, given the time sensitive nature of these Savage raid races, it's possible for the most dedicated FF14 players, the damage has been done.
