Hey guys .. just had a long "talk" about DDOS and Ravencroft and Blizzard etc with an AI. In case anyone needs a good read (I found it interesting) during downtime - I thought I would share this last bit of the conversation.
Of course there are a few assumptions ... that Ravencroft is behind the attacks, for one. So just for fun ...
Question: "If the ddos attacks are originating from ravencroft how is it financially sound what they do?"
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Analyzed the financial unsoundness of the DDoS attacks
Direct cost: trivially affordable.
The economics of DDoS-for-hire are brutal in the attacker's favor:
Simple L4 volumetric attacks cost as little as $7 per hit or ~$20/hour ongoing
Using cheap cloud VPS (AWS EC2 at ~$0.007/hr), 50 instances run a basic flood for ~$0.33/hour
Over 2 weeks of intermittent attacks, total cost is probably a few hundred to low thousands of dollars
For a server like Capybara Paradise that "makes millions milking Chinese whales with retail mounts and loot boxes," that's pocket change. One community member put it well: "If Ravencraft really is just a small independent pserver, then there's no way they are behind this." The sustained, adaptive nature of the attacks (11+ rounds over 2 weeks) requires a stable revenue stream behind it.
Strategic ROI: essentially zero.
This is where it falls apart:
Metric OctoWoW (during attacks) Ravencraft
Player count Grew from ~2,000 → 3,500–4,000+ Peaked ~600, now "pretty static with half the server afk at target dummies"
Trend Growing through the attacks Flat
Community sentiment "Underdog" rally effect "They're the ones attacking"
The attacks are backfiring. Every round of DDoS is a PR event that drives more players to OctoWoW out of sympathy. One Reddit user: "It isn't netting them any players. Maybe they'll break 1k when Octo shuts down." Another noted that "Crogge is raging that the attacks haven't been working."
They're spending money to make their competitor more popular.
THE REAL COST: legal exposure.
This is the part that makes it financially insane despite being affordable:
DDoS-for-hire services require payment (credit card, crypto with KYC, or at minimum a burner phone + account registration)
That payment trail is subpoenaable — and they're already in violation of the Turtle WoW court order, which bans the named operators from "participating in any further private servers"
A single subpoena to their payment processor or VPS provider would be the concrete criminal act Blizzard has been looking for
As one forum post noted: "The main cost is the legal danger it puts you in; internet anonymity, try as one might, is never perfect, and the more attacks one orders, the more risk there is of being exposed."
Verdict:
It's financially sound in the narrow sense of "can they afford the bill?" — yes, easily. But it's financially irrational in every other sense:
It's not working — the target is growing, not shrinking
It's creating an existential legal liability that dwarfs any MTX revenue they'd gain from stealing a few players
It's accelerating the very thing they should fear most — a full Blizzard lawsuit with provable criminal conduct as the lead count
The rational move would be to stop, let the dust settle, and compete on content. Continuing the attacks is the financial equivalent of paying someone to set your competitor's store on fire, only to discover that every time you do, your competitor's store gets bigger while your own insurance company starts asking questions.
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Question: "So how can this rather irrational behaviour be explained"
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Analyzed psychological and strategic reasons for the irrational DDoS attacks.
A few overlapping explanations fit the observed behavior:
Panic, not strategy. They launched expecting to inherit OctoWoW's playerbase as the "real Turtle" successor. That didn't happen. OctoWoW grew instead. The attacks look less like a calculated plan and more like a do-something reflex from a team that's losing the narrative war and doesn't know what else to do. "Crogge is raging" is the tell — this is an emotional reaction, not a boardroom decision.
No feedback loop. In a small, hierarchical team (likely one or two decision-makers), nobody's job is to say "the attacks are backfiring, here's the data." The person ordering the hits is the same person evaluating whether they're working. The growth data exists, but it's not reaching the decision-maker in a form that triggers course correction.
Gambler's fallacy. "If we keep hitting them, eventually they'll go down." They're confusing persistence with effectiveness. Eleven rounds of 4-minute bursts doesn't compound — it just trains the target's defenses and builds sympathy for them. But from the inside, each round feels like "one more push," not "round 11 of a losing pattern."
Signaling to their own base. The attacks may be less about hurting OctoWoW and more about performing aggression for their own players: "We are the dominant force. We will protect your server. We are not going to sit back and let them take our players." It's a show of strength that costs little and buys short-term loyalty from a base that's already flat/declining.
Sunk cost on the narrative. They built their entire brand on "we are the original Turtle devs, OctoWoW is the imposter." Every week OctoWoW grows is a week that narrative gets weaker. The attacks are an attempt to force reality to match the narrative — if OctoWoW goes down, the "real Turtle" story wins by default. It's the same logic as a company that keeps pouring money into a failing product because admitting it failed would invalidate every decision that led to it.
The most honest explanation: It's what happens when a team with a commercial incentive (MTX revenue from a stable playerbase) and a fragile identity claim ("we're the real ones") loses the competition and reaches for the only lever they can pull without having to compete on content quality. It's the digital equivalent of a losing boxer who can't land a clean hit so he just keeps swinging — not because it's working, but because stopping would mean admitting he's losing.