After an “extremely large” distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the Ravensburger website affected pre-sales of the Disney Lorcana: Rise of the Floodborn products, the online store is back up but Rise of the Floodborn products are not available. Some product listings state they will be “only available in stores,” but a select few will reportedly be available online on December 1, 2023.

Disney Lorcana: Rise of the Floodborn Coming to Ravensburger Online Store

The products that will supposedly be available on December 1 — which is the wide release date for this second chapter of Disney Lorcana — are the Disney100 collector’s edition, Winnie the Pooh playmat, Rise of the Floodborn Illumineer’s Trove, and Rise of the Floodborn booster pack display. Note that the date is listed as “01.12.2023,” which is the European date format for December 1 — it does not mean January 12.

Disney Lorcana: Rise of the Floodborn, the game’s second chapter, was released at specialty stores and Disney Parks on November 17 and will become available at general retailers on December 1.

Rise of the Floodborn had an extremely troublesome pre-sale launch on the Ravensburger website on November 20, which the company attributed to a DDoS attack. Sales were supposed to open at 10:30 a.m. ET, but the release was pushed to 11:30 a.m. ET just moments before the advertised launch time.

The company ultimately missed the 11:30 a.m. ET start time, citing a “technical difficulty.” An online queue finally opened at 1:05 p.m., with thousands of users promptly joining the line. The demand caused lengthy wait times and delayed website response.

Ravensburger ultimately paused the queue before reopening it without prior announcement.

Many users who entered the queue reported issues. Some had difficulty progressing through the line and were removed seemingly at random. Others shared word of making it through the queue only to have the website crash at checkout. There are even reports of users reaching checkout, receiving an error message that stated their order could not be processed, but having their payment method charged regardless.

On Tuesday, Queue-Fair, which ran Ravensburger’s online queue system, released the following statement.

Queue-Fair can confirm that we experienced an unprecedented challenge yesterday when both our systems and the Ravensburger system were unexpectedly targeted by the most aggressive DDoS attack we have seen during yesterday’s product launch. We had proactively provisioned architecture to accommodate more than 25 times the number of human beings that requested to join the queue.

Our automatic network-level bot protections successfully thwarted over 95% of the almost 5 Million bot traffic requests from reaching our servers, prevented bots from joining the queue, prevented bots from being passed from the front of the queue to the Ravensburger site, and ensured that the orders that were placed were from real fans, not bots and scalpers, as designed. It appears that the more measures we put in place to counter the traffic, the more aggressive the attack became.

However, the ramp up in scale of the attack shortly after the queue opened did temporarily overload the originally provisioned cluster and it did take us longer than we would have liked to safely and securely move the human visitors to a larger cluster capable of showing pages to all visitors while the attack was ongoing. This did result in some visitors seeing an error page for several minutes while we migrated the traffic.

We are committed to providing a smooth experience for all our customers and all their visitors. Our investigation continues. Lessons have been learned and moving forward we will ensure that our system is deployed for Ravensburger in a manner that protects our clients’ webservers from DDoS attacks as well as our own, ensuring a fair, secure and smooth experience for all.

Queue-Fair statement

Monday’s launch difficulties come after the game’s initial troublesome release. After a dangerous situation on the opening day of Gen Con 2023, there was an extremely limited stock of Disney Lorcana: The First Chapter products when it was released in late August, leading to scarce shelves, price gouging, and an inflated resale market. Ravensburger promptly announced intentions to issue an identical reprint in late 2023 to increase supply.

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