Hunt: Showdown was targeted by malicious attacks, devs reveal

Hunt: Showdown is regarded in these parts as one of the best, most suspenseful online shooters around. Morgan fell in love with it last year, while I've been bigging up its lesser-known Quickplay mode as a great battle royale alternative. But amidst the cracking shootouts and dashes for extraction, the game has stubbed its toe here and there, including a series of server issues and disconnects during the Traitor's Moon event last month.

Now, Crytek has released a YouTube video addressing the problems, and what it's doing to solve them. It turns out that, alongside ISP issues and backend faults at Crytek's end, the game was also targeted by malicious attackers during the event.

Hunt US community manager Arian Moshrefi went into more detail on the issues. "We've identified a few different cases that have caused server drops. These cases have included ISP problems—compatibility with them and Hunt have not been great but we're looking into that," he said. "We also had some malicious attacks that happened during the event. We're looking into that and want to be more protective against them in the future."

The game's social media manager Bence Hamos has assured players that better protections are now in place to prevent similar attacks happening again, and to make Hunt play nicer with ISPs the studio is looking at "alternative approaches to ensure that our packets are routed through faster networks in those cases where it's needed."

Those attacks on Crytek's servers just seem like a monumental waste of time for everyone. Surely hackers could put their time and talents towards better causes like disrupting nuclear programs or hijacking Amazon's homepage to troll Jeff Bezos... or something? What statement are you making by hacking a game other than "I am a monumental dickhead?"

As for the shortcomings on Crytek's backend, the company said it is actively tackling them, and expect to fix "a big portion of the remaining issues" in an upcoming update. Whether that will be part of the imminent 1.8.1 update (which features pistol-wielding zombies, among other things), we'll have to wait and see.