So Many People Played GT Sport on Christmas Weekend, PSN Thought it was a DDoS Attack

[ScottPuss20]

PSN still awful, even though people now have to pay for it. More news at 11.

Also, this sounds like horseballs to me. GTS hasn't sold enough for it to even make an online dent against goliaths like GTAV Online. If GTS counts as looking like a DDoS attack PSN would be down every other day. I would say that Sony allocated GTS a relatively small amount of online resources, and it straight up got overwhelmed at Christmas.

Don't forget to that GTA 5 has been around for a lot longer than GT Sport too, and was released to a much larger initial audience. They would expect heaps of people to play online daily relative to GT Sport. Something failed quite badly either within PD or Sony for such events to occur. Weirdly, I never had any issues connecting, yet my brother did.

COD - peer-to-peer
FIFA - peer-to-peer
GTS - dedicated servers

Typically anti-DDOS measures block only those services suspected of malicious behaviour. If they blocked everything, any attempt at DDOS would succeed, because all services would be denied...


It's clearly a configuration oversight - which PD is pointing the finger at PSN/SEN - that's resulted in any attempt to authenticate GTS through PSN (as the game does on startup) to be interpreted as malicious, blocking all of them. If that's the case, it wouldn't affect anything else.

So you're basically saying that the network type has an affect on whether or not the PSN suspects a DDOS? I still don't understand why Sony would assume that there's something suspicious going on, unless they weren't expecting a sudden increase in traffic. Which very much seems to be the case.

 

[dbarrade]

Potentially the DDOS (Distributed being the key word here) is tuned to align with sales figures, if there was a sudden influx of traffic not related to new sales then perhaps that could trigger the DDOS protection... but if that was the case it should also be tuned to align with DLC or Patches.

Ultimately they know how many people have downloaded the patch so therefore they know how many potential connections to expect.

My gut feeling is that PD hadn't told the security guys how many new connections the GT League part of the game was going to cause and they were expecting organic growth based on the previous number of connections made.