Cube World's alpha launch has been a rocky one—eager fans waiting to get their hands on the immensely charming voxel RPG likely haven't been able to buy the game yet, even though the developers have been trying to sell it for days now. At first, it seemed like it was just immense demand that was breaking the servers. In actuality, it's an intentional distributed denial of service attack, which disables the servers with high traffic.
"Initially we assumed the fault was on our side, like our download/updating system could be broken, so we closed the sale and improved our system," Wollay Funck, developer behind the game, told Kotaku."But it turned out that all these problems were the result of DoS attacks. It seems that someone is trying to systematically damage us and our business. The attacks usually occur during evening/night as soon as we open our store or user registrations. The attackers obviously want to prevent us from selling our game."
These are recent traffic stats. pic.twitter.com/6gjxjMwDfp
— Wolfram von Funck (@wol_lay) July 6, 2013
"Being just a small team (my wife and me), we didn't expect such things. We just tried to make our game available in its early state in the best possible way, which is on our homepage, where we can directly communicate with the community and provide patches and updates easily."
They're working their best to try to issue a fix, thankfully.
"Fortunately, we can sell the game outside of the attacks without problems, and, we're now extending our servers and team to handle the remaining issues. We don't have an ETA for this yet."
As of this writing, the game is still not available for anyone that wasn't lucky enough to be able to make an account on the (currently unavailable) website already.