Disney Lorcana Online Sales Event Canceled After DDoS Attack
“We are officially ending sales of Rise of the Floodborn on our website”
The launch of the second card game for Disney Lorcana ended Monday after a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack on the website of publisher Ravensburger. Monday, Disney LorcanaThe official Facebook account announced the DDoS attack. In a statement sent to Polygon, Ravensburger said it was not deterred by the incident and that additional direct-to-consumer online sales were planned in the future.
“While we are unable to provide more specific details at this time, we would like to apologize to any consumers who had a negative experience with our launch today,” Ravensburger said in his posts on X and Facebook. “We truly appreciate your support and are committed to improving your experience with future launches.”
Technology company Queue-Fair, which managed part of the infrastructure at the Ravensburger site, confirmed the attack on Tuesday.
“Queue-Fair can confirm that we faced an unprecedented challenge yesterday when our systems and the Ravensburger system were unexpectedly targeted by the most aggressive DDoS attack we have seen during the product launch yesterday,” said Queue-Fair, founded in 2004. on. The company said it estimates nearly five million bot accounts were involved.
“The more measures we put in place to counter (the attack), the more aggressive the attack became,” the company added.
Disney Lorcana is a new collectible card game (TCG) competing with two of the biggest names in the industry — Magic: The Gathering And Pokémon Trading Card Game. It does this by combining gameplay mechanics similar to Disney’s beloved stable of animated characters. But even though the game has been well reviewed, including here at Polygon, it has been difficult for your average consumer to get cards to play with.
In order to bring more products to market, Ravensburger announced a complete reprint of the game’s first deck of cards, titled The first chapterto coincide with the launch of Rise of the Floodborn. And yet, even with two games available more or less at the same time, it appears that market prices remain high and card availability remains an issue.
Hoping to further alleviate these pricing issues, Ravensburger has opted to try selling cards directly through its own website for a limited time. But the DDoS attack foiled those plans, locking consumers in faulty queues for hours.
“Our team worked extremely hard to resolve this issue throughout the day, but unfortunately this was not possible,” Ravensburger said in his posts on X and Facebook. “Effective immediately, we are officially ending sales on our website of Disney Lorcana: Rise of the Floodborn. »
Ravensburger said in a statement Tuesday that it would try online sales of this type again in the future.
“At Ravensburger, we understand the frustration with how the website launch went yesterday, and we are committed to ensuring the success of future web launches,” Ravensburger said. “In the short term, we will reallocate Rise of the Floodborn quantities of items to other channels to ensure these products can be purchased during the holiday season. In the medium to long term, we are taking all necessary steps to define a clear roadmap to ensure the success of our future website launches.
The problem with these early sales is the whole concept of “manufacturer’s suggested retail price”, which many in the trading card industry seem to ignore. Take, for example, a box of 24 booster packs – by far the most cost-effective way to get a bunch of cards at once to build decks. These boxes have a suggested retail price of $144, and Ravensburger first ships them to local game stores before fulfilling orders from big-box retailers or online giants like Disney and Amazon. Theoretically, this gives consumers a chance to support local retailers, and it gives local retailers the opportunity to develop repeat business – and a healthy local community of competitive players.
But with some rare cards fetching five-figure prices on online markets, speculators have stepped in to snap up as many unopened packs as they can find. That puts the so-called “market price” — which is privately tracked by eBay subsidiary TCGPlayer and other secondary markets — closer to $250 or more per box of cards. This price inflation is causing some independent retailers to choose to increase their own prices at checkout, for fear of losing the opportunity to return unopened boxes online at the inflated price. Still others are holding on.
In the meantime, Rise of the Floodborn in itself, it’s a great card game. It expands the mechanics available in the game, filling gaps in design goals and increasing the complexity of the overall metagame. But the metagame just isn’t much fun when finding cards is so difficult.
Update: Polygon has updated its original story with additional statements from Ravensburger and its technology partner, Queue-Fair.
Learn more
Gn tech
