Hello.
Today we have some somewhat unfortunate news. The account registration has been temporarily disabled for following reason:
FAF is currently under attack by a group of individuals.
They are using the playerbase as hostages by damaging their games, through using intentionally bugged installations to break them, mostly inside the game lobby.
The moderation team is working hard to actively mitigate the attackers, but here are some things you can do to prevent yourself from being affected:
The current method is to join a game and then get stuck in a “connecting to” state. The player cant be kicked, so you cant start the game.
The attackers are impersonating the moderators, so if a moderator tries to join your game you can be quite sure its an attacker.
Its important to note that the moderators present in aeolus are NOT impersonated. The attackers can only spoof in-game data. Everything on the faf client is considered trustworthy.
If you are affected, you need to rehost the game. We are working on a more long term solution to this, and in the process the faf experience should be improved even when we are not under attack.
When you see the connecting to message, but then a differrent name joins instead, you should forward that name to the moderation team, it could be the account name of the attacker.
When someone is in your game that you cant see in aeolus, or has a rating and game number thats different to aeolus, again forward that name to the moderation team.
You can host games, and if you are attacked, simply rehost the game when it was full with a password and then give it to the players present, that way the attackers cant rejoin.
You can also distribute this information to your friends so that everyone knows the current situation.
Lastly, it seems fitting to note current situation in a sentence:
A group of individuals is trying to change the attitude of an organization/governing body (FAF moderators and developers) by causing grief to innocent bystanders (players).
Now heres another sentence:
The unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.
That second sentence, is the definition of terrorism. That is what these people are.
Currently they believe themselves to be in the right, since they were banned from playing for abusing the rating system, and damaging FAF in the process.
Now they decided that doing this to get themselves unbanned will work.
If you are wondering who these people might be, they are known by the usernames of:
Super, Shado_Israel
Currently we have released a set of tools for the moderation team to take more effective action, and we are working on solutions to mitigate these attacks now and in the future.
As a more temporary solution for now, we have disabled the registration of new accounts. Don’t worry, we will soon enable new account registrations again.
That is all for now.
Regards, the moderation team, and the server, client and game development teams of FAF