Project 1999 DDoS

Some of you might be familiar with the old game EverQuest, but for those that are not it's an old MMORPG from Sony. Project 1999 was started to recreate the original classic game from 1999 without all the expansions that many people thought ruined the game. When the server started it didn't take long for DDoS attacks to start.. it really ruined the experience, not to mention got the server taken down for days at a time.

Last night the datacenter that hosts the server had enough, and they took the server down "indefinitly"

Now you might ask what's the big conspiracy in this? Well the day before they released info about how much was collected in donations to keep the server running.

I was hoping that we wouldn't have to beg for money, but when it is needed we will have to do it. The server depends on your donations and without funding the plug may have to be pulled. Due to the high population and popularity of the server we were required to move it almost immediately after launch. While the lag was gone, and the server stability was much better, it didn't come free.

It costs $180.00 per month to keep this thing up and running. We don't require people to pay to be able to play here but we are hoping with the large population that we do have that we can band together and raise enough money. My hope is that we can get enough donations to be in the green for a month or two after this but we will see how things go.

We are currently standing at $514.53.

We thank people who have donated in the past and hope to have your continuing support. For those who wish to donate please click the donate link on the right side of the homepage. All donation proceeds will be for the costs of hosting the server.

-Dev Team

Update: We have received enough donations to last a few months. Thank you!

I'm thinking of three different posibilities:

1) There was actually just some jerk that wasn't getting his way and set up this DDoS attack out of spite. That's generally what everyone thinks.

2) The Devs set this up so they could keep the money. Doesn't make quite as much sense seeing how they put a couple years work into the server.

3) Sony actually set up the attack. Either they didn't want the emulator server to be up just because or they didn't want people to experience "classic" EQ without paying. They've been known to do a "classic progression" similar to this.

Let me know what you guys think. I know it's no political or UFO conspiracy but maybe there's another ATSer out there that can understand the frustration from playing the game before

www.project1999.org...

note: on the front page.. notice nilbog says avoid drinking the conspiracy juice.. sometimes, it's just kinda hard

edit - to change title, thread was moved

[edit on 22-11-2009 by Estharik]

Unfortunately, the only "conspiracy" is likely that of a lack of planning and budget on the part of the server administrators.

A $180/month server is exceptionally low-end and highly susceptible to locking-up in moderately high traffic situations. When you add that massively multiplayer games are among the most process-intensive things an Internet server can do... any amount of unexpectedly high traffic and appear to be a DDoS.


Our very-first dedicated server (back in 2004), cost more than that.

reply to post by SkepticOverlord


If you don't mind me asking, what was the ballpark for the server you invested in? Where we were playing the max players were ~300 on a good night.

Our first dedicated server cost about twice the number you indicated, and we ran into problems with more than 500 simultaneous users. For massively multi-player server, 300 simultaneous users on a stock low-end dedicated server is quite a load.

I guess it also depends on where you live - here in the Netherlands we've got colocated servers from 25 euros and up. Of course you'd need to have a server for that, but considering it's a game from 1999, I'd say the cheapest of servers would be more than adequate to run it. This may be somewhat of a stretch EQ seems to be emulated (which by definition is slower) - but considering the exponential increase of RAM/HD/processor speed and bus throughput in a full decade, it can't be far off.

Project 1999 has their server colocated at Waveform in Michigan. The pricelist shows that there is no option for $180 a month. Since they continually speak of 'the server', I assume they don't have a rack but rather an actual 1U or 2U server, of which the latter is always the most probable (easiest to buy and manage). That still leaves them at a maximum of $100. It could be though that they set aside $80 for additional traffic, which can be quite the pricepooper; either that, or they bought 80 additional IP's as well .. Then again, maybe they have a backup server and put in $20 a month themselves to put both up.

I like approach #3 the best though, even though it seems unlikely - Sony researchers should be able to see the upside of having such followers and the downside of pissing them all off - maybe the owners of Project 1999 should release the DDoS IP addresses on their website ..

[edit on 22-11-2009 by scraze]