Who could have possibly predicted that usage would be high on Christmas after everyone opened their gifts?
It’s not a usage thing. The Lizard Squad is attacking the networks.
What pisse sme off is that these companies have tied so many services to their internal network structure that these boxes are basically useless when their network is down, specially to people like me, who use them for things other than playing games from a disc.
We couldn’t watch Youtube, use the plex app, or the amazon app. Yet another day where I regret not picking up an Amazon fire TV instead.
Xbone should allow me to sign in locally, should allow me to access internet services that do not require Xbox live, should allow me to use apps that do not require xbox live. This damn thing turned into a $500 paperweight most of today.
Is that confirmed by anyone other than LS itself? Because they seem to have to taken credit after the fact.
No, they announced it two days ago.
Also, it would be pretty sad if the consoles can’t manage dealing with what is probably a tenth or less of what an entity like Steam can deal with on a daily basis.
This happens every year and people are surprised every year.
Until I hear confirmation from Sony or MS, I’ll continue believing Lizard Squad was just jumping on an event they knew would happen from past experience.
MS, Sony, and Nintendo don’t release these numbers. So we actually have no idea how they compare. Though the last time they did, Xbox Live and Steam were operating with pretty similar concurrent user counts. Plus, Valve counts everyone who leaves the Steam app running on their computers, not just those playing:
With Steam’s record, it should be noted that this is 8 million concurrent users, not concurrent players. That’s the case because many users simply have Steam running in the background as they do other things on their computers, while maybe 20-25% are actually playing games at a given time. Technically, I’m part of that 8 million, with Steam running as I write this article.
Any counting of console users is going to be closer to the number of active players/active network users because most console people don’t leave their consoles running 24/7.
Not sure what you are trying to say here. I’m not arguing who has the largest base. Whatever the number of people with Xbones trying to log on tonight, it’s way smaller than the 8+ million people logged on steam and any one moment, and the 80+ million logged in on a daily basis. The Last time Xbox released these numbers by the way, it was 2 concurrent million users. It was several years ago though.
My point was and still is - Microsoft should have no issues hosting this many people, hence why I mentioned this when Loach thought it was a usage issue instead of a DDOS attack.
Also, I leave my xbone on all the time.
His point is that Steam numbers are not directly comparable to console numbers, because for all anyone knows, a “Steam user” is someone with the client running on a machine that they’re not even AT, which adds essentially zero load to the Steam network.
Edit: I should also point out that Steam fell down a bit when they started their winter sale.
Steam did used to get choked down around 10am pacific (new deal time) during the winter sales. The store page could take 10 seconds to load. Downloads would be slowish during the Christmas season. It didn’t affect the ability to play games though, just to shop and download new ones.
I’m not sure if Steam significantly beefed up their networks or they just rent as-needed server capacity when the holiday season rolls around, but now there’s no slowdown at all. I can still download games at full speed (>5MB/s) even during the height of the sale and everything is always perfectly responsive.
But even when it did slow down, it only affected the things that were actually being overloaded - the web servers for the store, the download servers for the game. Games could still be played, social features still worked, etc. It’s dumb that the xbox is set up to only allow you to use youtube or plex or do any of those things that aren’t related to their network usage when their network is working…
First of all, my point is that MS or Sony aren’t hosting a tenth of the users that Steam is. Do you know how many PS3s, PS4s, Xbox 360s, and Xbox Ones are out in the world? It’s considerably more than 7 million.
Which brings me to my point about concurrent users. Again, MS and Sony do not release those figures. So we don’t know how many concurrent users Xbox Live and the PSN host these days. But MS did say in 2009 that “more than 2 million people” were concurrently connected to Xbox Live in the month of November. Which is exactly the same as Steam’s 2.5 million concurrent user count from the same year.
So what I’m saying is that all three services probably host the same number of people, but the consoles are likely doing it in a more bandwidth intensive way because of how people use consoles (i.e. if they’re on, something is probably flowing through the network connection).
Plex and YouTube access are connected to your Xbox Live account. It is dumb, not going to argue. That said, games can still be played even if Xbox Live or the PSN goes down.
I assume not the multiplayer, that’s what I meant. In steam’s case, the ability to play games isn’t tied to the content delivery mechanism.
Not that it’s all that significant a problem, I assume the downtime is a few days a year at most.
The key point is the one raised by Kinthalis’ comment:
A few weeks a year downtime because of overload conditions on a network that is legitimately necessary for functionality is perhaps acceptable.
A few days a year downtime because of overload conditions on a network that is arbitrarily tied to functionality is simply not acceptable.
Sony has confirmed a DDOS attack took down their network on Christmas.
I’m honestly a little surprised it was real.
Why?
Haven’t government agencies fallen to the same?
I’m sure some fucking douchebags feel really smart and cool that they are “making a statement” or whatever the fuck. All the people that got new consoles for xmas and were looking forward to playing with friends over the holiday break get fucked over.
Way to go. :rolleyes:
Not only was it sure there was a DDOS, but Kim Dotcom promised them some vouchers if they’d stop. It seemed to work for a while, but then failed. You can’t really negotiate with a group with no leader. The unhappy people just split off.
Because the console networks go down every year at Christmas. I was pretty sure they were taking credit for something that happened naturally.
Weird. There’s no excuse for that shit nowadays. There are companies whose entire business model is to rent out infrastructure temporarily to other companies during time of high need. It’s fairly easy and very scalable and practical.