Last week the Minecraft website and servers were assaulted with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. Minecraft developer Markus Persson first acknowledged the problem via his blog: “I’m not sure exactly what’s going on, but minecraft.net appears to be suffering some kind of attack, and is down at the moment. I’m working on fixing it.”
In a subsequent update more details began to emerge, revealing the attacks to be DDoS in nature. Persson said that he was unsure as to why these attacks were occurring, and that he would just get back to coding while his server hosting guys looked into the problem.
Persson has now updated his dev blog with a message stating that he has signed up for a DDoS protection service and will soon be migrating the Minecraft server to far more powerful hardware.
Minecraft has been going from strength-to-strength within a relatively short space of time. Once a virtually unknown indie title, it has now become a top selling hit, having shifted over 320 000 units and earning Persson a tidy profit.
As a result, Persson has formed an official company to support Minecraft and the quickly growing team will soon occupy offices. Persson also plans to implement a proper credit card payment system for those who do not wish to use Paypal – something South African gamers waiting to get a taste of Minecraft action will likely appreciate.
On an update note (as reported by PC Gamer), Minecraft will be receiving some touches for Halloween – Ghasts and a ‘hell’ plane. Players can create a doorway out of obsidian and then set fire to it to create a portal to hell. Once in hell, any travel will cover 16 times the distance in the ‘real’ Minecraft world. To leave hell players must build another portal or use the one they came through. Ghasts occupy hell and they shoot fiery death. The fire will ignite anything it comes into contact with, making for some scary flaming situations.
The Halloween update also contains six new block types and tweaks to the surface world, which will generate snowy areas, deserts, forests and other climatic regions.
Keep up with Minecraft development over on The World of Notch.
Discuss Minecraft on the MyGaming forum.
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