For players all over the world, today is a day to remember.
This is especially true for North American players.
First, Dream Builder put more than 9 million holographic devices on shelves across North America—mainly in Xia, England, and France. Outside of these three countries, tens of thousands of units were also launched in other major markets in Asia and Europe as a small-scale test.
As for Germany, a batch had already been put on shelves on March 1st, so they were skipped this time.
In the markets that received a share, players rejoiced and scrambled to buy them.
Only North American players were so angry that they cursed.
They complained and petitioned the Los Angeles branch of Dream Builder, demanding fair treatment.
The Los Angeles branch of Dream Builder responded:
[We are working hard to communicate with headquarters, please wait for our good news.]
North American players weren't fools, and they instantly understood that this was a stalling tactic—
By the time you finish communicating, it will be a month later, right?
What's the difference between that and us doing nothing and just waiting?
What's the point of having you?!
They protested.
But the protests were ineffective.
And they didn't dare to curse the FBI, so they were all extremely annoyed.
It wasn't until the official release of "Monster Hunter" that they stopped sulking and turned their attention to the new game.
Dream Builder lived up to expectations, responding to players' half-year of anticipation with exciting large-scale scenes right from the start of the game.
Falling from the sky, being close to an Elder Dragon, then ascending from the ground, escaping danger from the dragon's mouth on a glider.
Right from the beginning of the journey, players exclaimed:
The latency soared!
So high that it was impossible to play.
They hit the monster, but the damage wouldn't register.
The monster hit them, and nothing happened at the time, but a few seconds later they were suddenly knocked away by "air".
Before they knew it, they were dead and on a stretcher, being carried away by the cat people.
At first, everyone thought there was a problem with their own network.
After all, Dream Builder's servers have always been trustworthy, and network problems have rarely occurred.
Even when Bloom City was first opened, tens of millions, or even hundreds of millions, of people flocked in, and the server didn't lag.
But after checking and checking, they didn't find any problems with their own network.
So they had to go online to ask.
As a result, as soon as they went online, they saw that Bloom City was suddenly closed, and tens of millions of players were kicked offline, asking around with question marks on their faces:
"Who is attacking Dream Builder?"
Only then did the players realize: "Oh! So it's not my problem, Dream Builder's server is being attacked."
And it was a very powerful network attack!
Otherwise, "Frost Snow Project", "War of Kings", and "Monster Hunter" would not have all been affected, and Bloom City and Silver City would not have been shut down on the spot!
Even after Dream Builder pushed the emergency shutdown notice for Bloom City, it immediately started a countdown.
The countdown was only 10 seconds long!
Not to mention arranging things on hand properly and returning to the login space to log off, even saying goodbye to friends was rushed.
In the Sky Arena, hundreds of thousands of arena matches were forced to stop halfway. The fighters hadn't even realized what was going on before they were ruthlessly kicked out of the server.
Hundreds of large and small businesses also had their plans disrupted, and live streaming for sales was temporarily interrupted.
—Remington Arms' live streaming for sales not only had a huge impact on the domestic arms sales industry, but also allowed many companies in ordinary industries to see new opportunities for live streaming sales.
Those who acted quickly had already begun to test the waters with holographic live streaming.
Dream Builder doesn't have holographic customization services yet, so their test live streams are all conducted in the existing Bloom City.
The sudden closure of Bloom City undoubtedly affected them as well.
…
The user base of Bloom City is already comparable to the total population of some small countries.
The losses caused by the sudden offline shutdown without any warning are not small.
It can be seen that the situation faced by Dream Builder is severe and the situation is critical!
The impact on global social networks is naturally astonishing!
Plus the players who were suddenly unable to continue playing halfway through the game…
As everyone knows, players tend to be very irritable when they are suddenly disturbed while playing games.
If it's a long-awaited new game, the irritability will double!
Tens of millions of players and users were affected at the same time, so you can imagine how much they hated the mastermind behind this network attack!
So, who launched this network attack?
Like Xu Meng, everyone's first reaction was Newly!
After all, the antagonism between the two sides has been too obvious during this period.
Newly has also been badly beaten by Dream Builder.
If everyone puts themselves in the position of Newly's CEO, they can't think of a way to defeat Dream Builder and turn defeat into victory through legal means.
—The software and hardware are both behind, even a god can't save it!
The only way seems to be to use means outside the rules—directly attack Dream Builder's server and destroy Dream Builder with off-the-table tactics!
This reasoning is very smooth in logic.
Then, the rest is simple—
Start cursing!
"Fuck you Newly! Fuck you Gamestation!"
"Dirty tricks! You don't deserve to be a game publisher at all! Shameful!"
"You can't beat them in games, you can't beat them in consoles, you're an embarrassment!"
"I'm about to land the last few hits on the BOSS! You bunch of stinky dog shit ruined it, and I have to start all over again!"
"I'm really ashamed to be your user!"
"This is my game station console, and now I'm going to smash it to protest your unethical behavior!"
......
Players from all over the world, having nothing better to do, concentrated their efforts on attacking the social network accounts of New Force Game Station.
This allowed New Force Game Station to fully appreciate the culture of profanity in more than a dozen languages in less than half an hour.
In the end, they had no choice but to close the comment section.
Under normal circumstances, it would have been time to start crisis public relations.
Regardless of the truth, they should deny it outright at the first moment.
But New Force didn't.
Because they couldn't afford to.
The knife of DDoS attacks, of course, feels good when used to attack others.
But being stabbed by someone else wielding that knife is very painful!!
New Force is, after all, a large multinational corporation, and naturally, they have no shortage of traffic scrubbing and high-defense gateway measures to defend against DDoS attacks.
But what they are currently encountering is bandwidth crushing and complex attack combinations.
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— The attack traffic exceeded the bandwidth limit of the high-defense gateway and scrubbing center from the very beginning. At the same time as the DDoS attack, network layer and application layer attacks also began simultaneously. Moreover, the attackers were adjusting the attack patterns in real-time with amazing reaction speed, bypassing the rule-based scrubbing strategies.
When the opponent is wielding a mountain, and can still be fast and accurate.
What else can you do?
New Force's defense system was breached in a very short time.
Even the time they had to resist was a smokescreen released by Little Dream—to buy time to find key information and obtain higher operational permissions.
While New Force's security team was overwhelmed and unable to parry, and the management was holding an emergency meeting to discuss countermeasures, Little Dream had already done everything that needed to be done.
And New Force didn't even know that their database was in imminent danger.
With Xu Meng's command, the sledgehammer in Little Dream's hand also swung down.
So, with a 13-hour time difference, it was 11 . in New York.
New Force Entertainment North America Headquarters, all computers in the on-state—whether it was the office computer of the security department or the computer connected to the projector during the emergency meeting, simultaneously popped up a phrase:
[FIND YOU!]
The caught-off-guard security engineers were horrified and shocked, and each of them quickly retreated, subconsciously moving away from the screen.
The executives in the office who were not vigilant enough just frowned and asked:
What's going on?
Have we been hacked?
The next second, their doubts were answered—
[Database formatting in progress...]
Below this line of text, a progress bar appeared, and the progress bar started to advance rapidly the moment it appeared!
1%, 3%, 5%, 7%...
In just a few seconds of daze, the progress was pushed to 10%!
"Is this... real?" Some people still couldn't believe it.
"Where's the head of the security department?! Didn't you say that the defense hadn't been breached yet?"
Herman roared in anger.
"What's going on?!"
The person in charge was covered in sweat, "From our perspective, the defense hasn't been breached, and there are no signs of intrusion at the system level."
Herman pointed to the progress bar on the screen that was constantly advancing, his voice extremely loud: "No?! Then what is this? Fake?!"
The progress bar had been pushed to 15%.
The person in charge was also doubting his life, subconsciously thinking about where the problem was.
"Damn it! Is this the time to be daydreaming?! Is our database information really being deleted?"
"Looking at the server..."
The person in charge was interrupted by Herman again as soon as he opened his mouth:
"Stop talking nonsense, answer directly, yes or no!"
"I..." The supervisor's mouth even started to tremble with nervousness, but he still insisted, "I can't be sure."
The crushing of technology almost destroyed his confidence.
Herman, on the other hand, acted decisively, and said without hesitation upon hearing this: "Cut off the network completely! Cut off the power if necessary! Cut off the physical connection as well!"
"The database cannot be lost!"
"Yes!" The person in charge nodded, and was about to give the order when he saw the report from his subordinate—
The server crashed.
......
......
The US is the largest user market for New Force Game Station, with over 40 million users.
Now, for over a million of these 40 million users who are currently playing the game, a prompt window popped up on the interface almost simultaneously:
[Server connection failed, reconnecting...]
After reconnecting for a few seconds, the exact same prompt popped up again:
[Server connection failed, reconnecting...]
......
This cycle continued repeatedly.
Until it became [Server lost].
These millions of players were confused and came to social networks and player communities, wanting to ask what happened.
Many people didn't know about the war that was taking place on social networks until this time.
The users of Building Dreams, who were originally furious, instantly burst out laughing.
— Although Building Dreams is very miserable, at least the game can still be played.
Logging in often fails, but it's not completely impossible to get in after trying a few more times.
The delay is very high and you can't fight, but at least you can look at the scenery, mine, and collect herbs.
Unlike New Force, the server is directly blown up!
Social networks were suddenly filled with schadenfreude:
"Hahaha, die well! Open the champagne!"
"Good riddance! You got what you deserved!"
"Did Building Dreams fight back? I knew that Boss Xu was a ruthless person!"
"Continue! This is more fun than playing games!"
"Fight! Awesome!!"
