Recently, it has emerged that players utilizing For Honor's multiplayer modes have been suffering occurrences of drophacking and DDOS'ing. What exactly are both of these things? Essentially, drophacking is when a player is booted from a multiplayer match by another in-game player, and DDOS'ing is when a player sends so much information or 'data' to a person's network that they end up 'lagging' and dropping out. It is also important to note that not all the instances are DDOS's, but also DOS's, or Denial Of Service attacks instead of Distributed Denial Of Service attacks, which are generally much more focused and malicious. The difference between DDOS/DOS' and drophacking is that drophacking is usually only for that specific match, while DDOS'ing is something that can (and does) completely take up your entire internet connection with useless information. Good lucking downloading anything or even accessing Google if you can't even load a .jpg image.
One instance of DDOS'ing shows a player stating "go ahead & fight me see if i dont ddos everyone here lol" and proceeding to have the players' teammate and himself removed from the game. While the player has been permanently banned from For Honor, that doesn't mean that the underlying issues have yet been fixed.
A Reddit post by EpicUser1989 has an extensive write-up on For Honor's current Peer-to-Peer model, which differs from most Peer-to-Peer models due to not having a single host but instead having everyone connect to everyone else. The problem is, is that if one wanted to they are able to do a multitude of things:
The problem with the current P2P model is you can actively see everyone you connect to and their WAN IPs. This allows you to do a multitude of things such as DDoSing a single or multiple users, Causing Lag via different ping methods, Kicking people from matches, Closing a server down etc.EpicUser1989 went on to state in a later edit that his 'group of 4' have been 'forcibly removed' from nine out of fifty matches. Of these removals, an individual apparently got DDOS'd for 'around 35 minutes' before the attack stopped.
Hopefully, Ubisoft can fix these emerging issues for their newest title before it irreparably damages For Honor's brand. We'll see.
We have reached out to Ubisoft for comment and further details on the situation.
Quick Take:
We warned you, Ubisoft. While I cannot claim to be anywhere near an expert on this issue, even I can still easily see how dedicated servers should have been in the game to begin with. Seriously, is it that hard to give your player base even a little bit of control over their own game? It's gotten so bad that they cannot even play the single-player mode offline, (although Ubisoft was originally going to allow this) even if they wanted to, which is ridiculous. With The Division, Rainbow Six: Siege, and now For Honor suffering from multiplayer issues where either a users' IP address was easily found or had players negatively influencing other playerss experience beyond the boundaries of the game, this hopefully means that the words 'dedicated' and 'servers' becomes synonymous with 'online gameplay' once again. Until then, I personally advise you to wait for a fix before picking this title up, or waiting until Mount and Blade: Bannerlord's release, which is looking more impressive with each gameplay video.Are you playing For Honor? What do you think of this emerging issue? Let us know in the comments!
