No, trust me, it's absolutely excluding them.
We have the same ISP and I live exactly one mile away from them...however, in a newer neighborhood.
We did EVERYTHING (read previous posts) to try to resolve the problem.
They were both in game and on the goblinworks site Sunday morning...albeit, the website was loading very slowly.
After the patch came out (and there was a secondary patch Sunday afternoon), they were completely unable to connect to either the game (alpha.goblinworks.com) or the website (goblinworks.com).
I coached them through what I could over the phone, however, with the level of frustration involved...eventually, I took my wife to their house. She's head and shoulders better than all of us combined when it comes to this kind of thing.
She went through both of their systems with a fine toothed comb. Bitter Thorn's computer is brand new...my wife put it together for him. Gwyndar's computer is my old Alienware that I gave her with a fresh copy of Windows on it. Bitter Thorn's level of paranoia combined with the amount of time they've had either computer (less than a week) pretty much ensures that they haven't managed to get any nasty viruses....and that was confirmed by my wife.
Along with everything else she did, she also brought down their Norton firewall just to try to connect and got nothing. She eventually pinged both locations through DOS and got a complete failure to connect. It's as if both alpha.goblinworks.com and goblinworks.com simply do not exist to them.
This morning, after posting here, I got this brilliant idea to release/renew the IP...if the DDoS attack were IP based, getting a fresh IP address should (in theory) solve the problem. Nope. Nothing.
I suggested contacting Comcast (our ISP) and seeing if perhaps they can do anything about it. If you know anything about Comcast, it's an "iffy" proposition at best...odds are fairly good you're going to get a $10/hr person that flips through a binder and blows smoke up your third point of contact. But, it's worth a try.
Now, granted, I'm not up to speed with computers anymore. 20 years ago, I'd have been right on top of this. Unfortunately, technology (much like children) have progressed way beyond my ability to cope. I read up on DDoS attacks and they seem to be something that targets a given server cluster. Ok, that makes sense to me but....and see if my logic is flawed here...I doubt that PFO was the intended target.
PFO Alpha has been around for a minute or two now. Granted, they were on a "local" server that was only up on the weekends. Recently, with 8.1, they ported over to another server...or, rather, a company that supports the server and it's online all the time except for maintenance.
If the DDoS attack were specifically targeted at PFO, one would think that if the attacker were competent, NOONE would be able to get into the game or access the website. As it stands now, it's just a few people here and there that are having this problem.
My logic is telling me that the attack was targeted at the server itself...possibly for something else it hosts and PFO is collateral damage. Let's say the server hosts some kind of paypal sort of client, you know, something that processes money or something. Someone attacks it with a Distributed Denial of Service attack and pretty much everything else the server hosts is going to be affected as well.
Again, I'm not a smart man...I'm a barbarian. But, this kinda makes sense to me.
I'm posting pretty much all of this over on the goblinworks forums (yeah, why didn't I do this earlier? I told you, I'm not smart)and maybe they can look into it. Hopefully, they've called Comcast and seen if anything can be done on that end. One would think that eventually, someone that knows what they're doing will get hold of this.
On the bright side, they're accumulating XP while sitting around.
