14 DAY TRIAL // Valve has finally issued a statement concerning the recent issues that have plagued its Dota 2 online experience, saying that its different servers have been the victim of different DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks, not to mention other issues. However, it is working on rectifying the vulnerabilities, while improving its in-game mechanics to not punish players who are disconnected during a match.
Dota 2 is extremely popular in the free-to-play multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) genre, especially since developer Valve tries to keep players as happy as possible by releasing new updates and other such things.
Unfortunately, in recent days, things haven't been going so well for Dota 2 players who engage in matches across the US servers or the Europe West ones, as they've gone through periods of extremely high latency and packet loss, resulting in disconnects from the matches or even complete abandons.
The fact that Valve didn't say anything and that Dota 2 continued to punish players who were the victim of these issues caused a pretty big backlash online, and now the studio has finally made a statement about the whole ordeal and how it's trying to fix it.
Plenty of DDoS attacks have been directed at the Dota 2 servers
First up, the studio explains that its servers have been attacked via DDoS measures in recent days, and while they managed to cope in many situations, there have been instances when they buckled under the pressure.
The DDoS attacks targeted both an entire data center for a region, such as US East or Europe West, as well as actual single servers to disrupt specific matches, like those in actual professional competitions, according to Valve.
"DDoS attacks on an entire data center for a region, are particularly problematic because they saturate the entire connection into the data center. This is a very recent type of attack that has been plaguing a variety of high profile games. The second, directed attacks on a single server, is one that we’ve released various fixes for over the past month. These attacks largely targeted pro players or tournaments."
These attacks, combined with issues in the actual network connectivity area, mean that quite a few players worldwide have encountered issues in recent days, according to the studio.
Valve is fixing these problems in a thorough manner
However, the studio is working hard to ensure a better defense against the DDoS attacks, as well as increased connectivity between large internet service providers and its actual servers.
What's more, it's tweaking the safeguards inside Dota 2 to detect faulty network conditions not only when people disconnect, but also when they have high latency.
"Previously, our detection algorithm was only triggered when multiple players completely lost connection to the game server. This new algorithm will now monitor the actual quality of the server’s connection to its players, and trigger in the case of poor connectivity for multiple players. Matches flagged as having Poor Network Conditions will be immediately safe to leave, and won’t record their results," the studio explains.
As such, expect to see an improvement in your Dota 2 matches in the near future.