Some people just hate it when other people have fun and when creatives succeed. That's the only takeaway I have from an update by the four developers of BattleBit Remastered, the lo-fi 254-player shooter that released mid-June to broad acclaim and a coveted spot atop Steam's best-sellers list.
The latest update details how developers SgtOkiDoki and crew were subjected to "significant" DDoS attacks on BattleBit's servers starting on launch day. The first week after launch was pretty smooth sailing, and few people noticed anything aside from packet loss, because the devs' firewall was ready to go and held up. Held up despite, to quote the developers: "A significant number of DDOS attacks on all of our servers continuously, some of them literally a day long."
The relative peace let the BattleBit devs work on quality of life improvements, bugfixes from community reports, and new content. The second week after launch was a bit rougher.
"A determined group of individuals who previously failed to take down our servers found a weak point in our firewall and started attacking any server they wanted using this weakness," said BattleBit's devs. "As a result of these attacks on our game servers, our server scheduling system also malfunctioned (e.g., 900 people waiting in queue, etc.), which significantly affected our development. We had to focus on collecting attack data, analyzing it, and working on fixing this flaw in our firewall."
They did not make a comment on the situation at the time to avoid "alerting other people who had failed to take down our servers about this flaw in our firewall until it was patched."
Now that it's dealt with the BattleBit team has time to add more to their game. Which is nice, because over here on PC Gamer Morgan Park already pointed out what's good about BattleBit: There's no catch, it's just a lot of game for $15. That it's standing out in the crowded shooter genre says a lot about how much fun people are having on those huge, chaotic battlefields.
The Battlebit team remains comitted to the game, they reassure players, and will do so "whether or not we maintain this level of popularity." They also intend to recruit a team who specializes in detecting cheats and weeding out cheaters. There are also new game modes, new weapons, gadgets, maps, and map reworks in the future. There are also community servers on the way, which will have "dedicated game modes, maps, and tweaked game mode rules based on the admin's preference."
Indie battlefield with community servers. This is why I play on PC.
You can read the whole dev report on Steam, and you can find BattleBit Remastered on Steam for $15.
