Very late game DDoS attacks - Is this intended?

[ajengine]

I have been playing a game without the CEO aging (no retirement) and no employee aging. I am in about 80+ years. I have two websites running and even reached some 50 million users each at some point around the 50 - 55 year mark.

There were a series of strong DDoS attacks before but after this point the attacks became really strong. The situation is such that I lose a few hundred thousand users every time and it happens once every few days. At one point, I had acquired and merged a competitor site but now my total registered users number has fallen below what was the user count of the acquired site on its own.

I read some 3 - 4 year old discussions that talked about stronger DDoS attacks in the later game. One suggestion was to 'oversize' hosting. Normally my hosting usage hovers between 5% to 15%.

Now that the user count has fallen it is hovering at 1% of hosting usage for one site and 8% or so for the other one. I believe that this is oversized. I never came across DDoS attacks this strong when I played the career mode.

Previously, on another play through, I had installed a cheat mod and played over 70 years just to see what the very late game looked like. Then I deactivated the mod and started this custom game (no mods activated) with the above settings to play a long and fairly relaxed game. I am not sure if activating the mod on a previous play through somehow broke the game.

At this point the only real option seems to be to spend on aggressive marketing while also trying to get the DDoS protection feature installed and set up. I even had it on one of the sites for while with about 50% efficiency but it didn't seem to help.

In case of an attack, the hosting usage says '>300%' and the response time shown is ">9999 ms". This did not change regardless of increasing servers and I even lost users while having the 50% DDoS protection on one site. Either site would get attacked and since it is a shared hosting room, both would lose a few hundred thousand users in each attack.

Since there is not much time in between for my ad campaigns to gain back the lost users, I am losing a million users or thereabouts every 1 to 1.5 years in game.

Has anyone else faced this? Are the mods interfering? (I have unsubscribed from the one mod just to see if that changes things - it doesn't seem to have changed much).

Is this intended?

I suppose the only thing left to do is to get 100% DDoS protection on both sites and let it run for a while.

[zenmike]

You said your normal utilization is 5-15%. What's your response time under normal circumstances?

[zenmike]

More specifically I'm curious about the base response time from the top of the features tab.

[ajengine]

Originally posted by zenmike:

More specifically I'm curious about the base response time from the top of the features tab.

One site says 47 - 50 ms
The other one says 68 - 70 ms

I tried playing forward after this post and I have reached 60% DDoS protection on one site and 50% on the other. The response time is from the point where both sites are at above 50% DDoS protection.

Since I haven't added servers on changed efficiencies on the features and I was only concentrating on DDoS protection, I will assume that these response times were correct at the time of the first post in this discussion.

I also have a clock controller in the hosting (had it since well before) with two rules - one for each site to 2X the clock speed (200%) in case of DDoS.

I was curious to see if the mod broke the game somehow. Note that I had not activated the mod when I started this save. It was subscribed but it had been turned off from the main menu.

Just to be sure, I unsubscribed from the mod and ran the game and I got a double DDoS in year 90+ which now drops half a million users from both sites. I managed to get a screenshot of this. At this point, I had 40% DDoS protection on one site and at least 40% on the other one too (See screenshot - https://i.imgur.com/9II56Rk.jpg )

Then I also got a situation where my first site went viral during a DDoS. ( https://i.imgur.com/Pmjmi1j.jpeg ).

After having 50% DDoS protection on both sites and having unsubscribed from the mod, which was never used in this particular save game - I saw ">300%" server use.

So, I decided to play with the mod and see if 100% DDoS protection would make a difference.

With the mod on, in a different copy of this run (save file copy made at a point before making this post) - I reached 100% DDoS protection. I got hit by a double DDoS after getting 100% DDoS protection and once again it went over 300% server use. ( https://i.imgur.com/BTYgqqT.jpeg )

I will continue with the modded save file and see if there is any change over time.

Unless I am mistaken, it might be that the mod has messed with the strength and frequency of the DDoS or maybe the game was never intended to be played this long.

[ajengine]

An update on this

It appears that the very late game is ruined by unstoppable DDoS

I had a saved copy in which I activated the Cheat Menu Plus mod and in that I turned on unlimited money and unlimited components.

I upgraded the DDoS protection on both my sites to 100%. No difference.

A DDoS attack on one of the sites would overload the servers to ">300%" and response time goes over 9999 ms. I lose users. I truly oversized my hosting to the point where both websites had sub 5% use of the hosting capacity at all times. Once again the DDoS took the servers out.

Screenshot of DDoS on one site - https://i.imgur.com/jS7Bdtk.jpeg
Both sites have 100% DDoS protection at this point and the hosting is supersized.
Screenshot of normal use just after the above DDoS

Site 1 - https://i.imgur.com/ZcWyhzA.jpeg
Site 2 - https://i.imgur.com/qyOgN8V.jpeg

Of course user satisfaction dropped to 60% because of the 100% DDoS protection + Video ads. Site impressions had fallen below the required number for the current contracts for video ads on both the sites. Interestingly even after paying the 20% penalty, I seemed to make profits. I suppose as the views fall further due to users lost by DDoS attacks this penalty would create losses to the point where I would have to take smaller contracts.

I assume that subscriptions also would go down. I don't think there is a viable option here to make money by running large websites.

So unless the mod has broken the game itself (which is unlikely), this seems to be a design feature. I did not start this game play with the mod active so I am assuming that the mod did not mess with the original save file until way after these consistent DDoS attacks started and I tested out the mod in a different copy of the play through.

Unfortunately, this makes long play without mods unviable.

There would have to be a mod that stops DDoS attacks completely or a patch that limits the strength of the DDoS to a certain limit or maybe this is just an issue with my copy.

I would like to know if anyone else has tried this and what your experience was like.

At some later point, I may try this after uninstalling and reinstalling the game and without any mods.

[zenmike]

I haven't seen this. But I'd be kind of curious to see one of your save files from last week. Maybe come over to the Discord server and I could take a look.