Recent ddos lag

A couple days ago you may have noticed more lag on the ET servers. This is due to a ddos attack against our server provider. ddos attacks are a way of flooding servers and routers with meaningless data that causes lag and disruptions to everyone connected.

It does not infect your computer or download anything to our players. It is directed at the datacenter itself where we rent the machines that normally provide ultra-reliable performance.

ddos is nothing new or interesting, and we have been ddossed many times before. Our response is to reduce the amount of bandwidth and CPU power we need to run our ET servers. So we lowered the number of omnibots, and took out minas (which lags for many people especially in the early part of the map in the large open grassy area). I am aware this is controversial.

Omnibots and laggy maps contribute much more to lag than the faster weapons. So my approach is to reduce the omnibots (or turn them off if things get worse) and run less resource-intensive maps. We want to keep players from getting choppy lag or getting disconnected.

When the ddos has been corrected we will restore the omnibots and the minas map.

Thanks for your patience.
obit

This ddos appears to have cleared up and we have restored the omnibots and the Minas and Temple maps.