Disney Lorcana creator Ravensburger has announced they are no longer selling Rise of the Floodborn products on their website, following a disastrous pre-release event that saw the site crash under the huge influx of traffic. Although Rise of the Floodborn doesn't officially release until December 1st, Ravensburger was giving fans a chance to pre-order the latest set via their website through this pre-release event.
The plan was to have visitors enter a virtual queue that would randomly place them in line when the sale began. After multiple setbacks, the sale began hours after its original start time and immediately crashed the website. Many who had waited hours in line were greeted with server errors, losing their place in the queue.
Following the disastrous pre-launch event, Ravensburger took to social media to attempt to explain what had happened. The game maker blamed the issues on "an extremely large DDos (Distributed denial of service) attack which severely disrupted the launch of Disney Lorcana: Rise of the Floodborn."
"Our team has worked extremely hard to solve this problem over the course of the day, but unfortunately that has not been possible," the company continued. "As of now we are officially ending our website sales of Disney Lorcana: Rise of the Floodborn. While we are not able to offer more specific details at this time, we want to apologize to consumers who had a negative experience during our launch today - we truly appreciate your support and are committed to improving your experience of future launches."
Although some were skeptical about the DDoS attack, technology company Queue-Fair, which managed Ravensburger's site infrastructure, also confirmed the attack.
“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,” Queue-Fair said on X. "We had proactively provisioned architecture to accommodate more than 25 times the number of human beings that requested to join the queue."
The company estimates that there were nearly 5 million bot traffic requests and that they had successfully thwarted over 95% of them. Bots are often used by scalpers to secure products and then later sell them for double, sometimes triple the MSRP.
Despite the cancellation, there are reports that Ravensburger was selling Rise of the Floodborn product earlier this morning. Although the site still struggled to keep up with the demand, many were able to secure purchases until all available product sold out.
Speaking to Polygon, Ravensburger said that additional direct-to-consumer online sales are planned in the future.
In the meantime, Rise of the Floodborn is available to purchase through pre-release at local game stores. Many, however, are charging more than the MSRP. The set's official release is slated for December 1st, when it arrives at big box retailers like Target, Walmart, Best Buy, and Amazon. Some of these retailers have already begun taking pre-orders for the newest set, but they tend to sell out online in minutes, if not seconds.
In addition to Rise of the Floodborn, Ravensburger has ordered a full reprint of Disney Lorcana's first set of cards, The First Chapter. The reprints began arriving at stores earlier this month, but are still incredibly difficult to find.