Trion Worlds North American game servers are located at Comcast’s data center in Dallas, Texas. This is of course one of Comcast’s many business/enterprise operations center located across the country.
Typically, these data centers do provide service level agreements (SLA) for various threat management including DDoS detection and mitigation. This is Comcast Business overview of their service offerings (and this is a more detailed support article of their DDoS detection and mitigation).
Unlike before where DDoS attacks were primarily volumetric (data flooding), attack vectors are now pretty much multi-prong using a combination of volumetric, application, and protocol level attacks. So it is natural now that DDoS mitigation involves a multi-layered/multi-tiered defense strategy including detecting volumetric attacks at the edges and redirecting potentially malicious traffic to a security operations center where that data is scrubbed to identify the more sophisticated/targeted attacks.
None of this comes cheap though which is why there are usually different tiers of SLA’s that companies can subscribe to based on their needs.
Considering that Trion’s North American region games have been affected for over a month now (lag and disconnects), either Comcast Business’ threat management is absolutely crap or Trion World is going with a lower cost tier SLA for such threat management (or a combination of both).
I do realize that one of Trion’s original investors was Comcast Ventures (a venture fund that is affiliated with Comcast Corporation) which is why their data center is Comcast Business (think preferred long term contract offerings back during that time).
Other companies including Square Enix (NTT America) and Blizzard (AT&T Hosting) have been able to mitigate such attacks where players do not at least constantly face disconnections (they may still experience latency spikes but not the frequency of disconnects) from their games once mitigation steps are under way. Trion and/or Comcast Business on the other hand seems to have not been able to get this under control for 5 straight weeks now.
Sure, Trion’s Terms of Service does not guarantee service uptime but there is a point where continuous disconnects does have consequences with the actual playability of a game. Trion on their part tends to provide compensation of sorts (some decent and some outright bad) but there is a point where people just want to play (games are supposed to be entertainment and not sources of frustration due to these external factors).
