Ravensburger was attacked by over five million bots on Nov. 20 as sales for Rise of the Floodborn and The First Chapter became available, forcing the organization to temporarily discontinue online sales for Disney Lorcana products.
Players attempting to purchase Disney Lorcana Rise of the Floodborn and Disney100 products were continually booted from the Ravensburger website on Nov. 20 due to over five million bot requests that flooded the site, according to Queue-Fair. Ravensburger attempted to stop the DDoS attack but was unable to, forcing the organization to end all website sales of Rise of the Floodborn.
Ravensburger expected high demand for Rise of the Floodborn, which is why Queue-Fair had a built-in system to “accommodate more than 25 times the number of human beings that requested to join the queue.” But a DDoS attack of epic proportions was not expected, and the attacks got worse as additional measures were put in place to prevent them.
“Our automatic network-level bot protections thwarted over 95 percent of the almost five million bot traffic requests from reaching our servers,” Queue-Fair said on Twitter on Nov. 21.
Many players were booted from the queue or were sent back to it while attempting to enter purchase information. Queue-Fair confirmed this on Nov. 21 as the DDoS attack “temporarily overloaded the original provisioned cluster,” with visitors getting an error page while “traffic was migrated.”
Local game stores received the first Rise of the Floodborn products on Nov. 17 and a retail launch is slated to drop on Dec. 1. Many players were seeking to purchase products from the Ravensburger site as the costs were closer to MSRP and in hopes of grabbing a limited Disney100 box.
Dot Esports has reached out to Ravensburger to see when the organization plans on selling Disney Lorcana products online again. No date has been given at time of writing.
Update Nov. 21 2:07pm CT: Dot Esports received the following statement from Ravensburger on yesterday’s DDoS attack: “We at Ravensburger understand the frustration with how yesterday’s website launch went, and we are committed to ensuring that future web launches can be successful. In the short term, we will be reallocating Rise of the Floodborn item quantities to other channels to ensure that those products are purchasable during the holiday season. In the medium and long term, we are taking all steps necessary to define a clear roadmap to ensure our future website launches are successful.”
