Final Fantasy 14's NA servers continue to struggle with DDoS attacks, likely due to a service provider's wonky nodes

A viper in Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail looking utterly perplexed, hood down, while stood on a beautiful sunrise overlooking a crystal blue sea. — (Image credit: Square Enix)

Final Fantasy 14's North American servers have been hammered by DDoS attacks since the release of Patch 7.4—I'd know, I play on them—which has players starting to grind their teeth in frustration. Especially given the release of the latest Savage (high-difficulty) raid tier, and the race to world first that buoys it.

Take a look at the game's official status page, and you'll see notice after notice detailing "recoveries from DDoS" attacks, most of which kicked off in September, primarily affecting North American data centers. On a personal note, most of my gaming sessions, as someone who plays on one of these things, have been interrupted by a DDoS error at some point.

In a separate thread, user LastTraintoSector6 writes: "I'm not trying to be alarmist, but I've only been playing about four hours tonight and have been 'DDOS'd' off of Crystal five times … I'm not threatening to unsub, but I do expect better than this from Square-Enix. Because getting booted mid-content is absolutely a complete downer."

Surely One More Year from r/ffxiv

Players aren't particularly charmed on its official forums, either. A now 33-page thread is flooded with complaints. It doesn't help that there are a ton of activities in FF14 where a disconnect will scupper the whole thing: Expensive crafting recipes borked, neck-and-neck enrages with the new endgame raid bosses failed and—I am not kidding, this is a serious issue—windows to catch ultra-rare fish, completely missed.

So, why's this happening? Well, given some players have had success with rerouting using VPNs, it's likely a faulty node somewhere along FF14's service provider, NTT. In a—oof, three-year-old, 150-page—thread detailing issues with the provider, user HyperiusUltima notes:

"Yep, it's the Sacramento Node Again. I just ran a tracert and the ping jumps up pretty high at times forcing disconnects. They can't call it DDOS anymore if NTT isn't gonna do their damn job. If anything, can SE just think about changing providers in the future? They are literally SE's Cash Cow right now and they're letting it burn."

If this is the case, then Square Enix might be in a bind, depending on the duration of its contracts with NTT. Either way, it's not a great look for the developer, given director Yoshi-P promised during Dawntrail's release that "we have gone through a process of having perfect defences". Granted, if it is a third-party provider screwing things up, it's out of his hands—but at this point it's time for Square to really put the screws on, or suffer a rightfully-miffed playerbase.

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Harvey's history with games started when he first begged his parents for a World of Warcraft subscription aged 12, though he's since been cursed with Final Fantasy 14-brain and a huge crush on G'raha Tia. He made his start as a freelancer, writing for websites like Techradar, The Escapist, Dicebreaker, The Gamer, Into the Spine—and of course, PC Gamer. He'll sink his teeth into anything that looks interesting, though he has a soft spot for RPGs, soulslikes, roguelikes, deckbuilders, MMOs, and weird indie titles. He also plays a shelf load of TTRPGs in his offline time. Don't ask him what his favourite system is, he has too many.

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