Strangely enough most of you (sorry, but I'm including you Rogean here) seem to be assuming that the person undertaking this attack has a personal beef against the server, this seems highly unlikely. Your average EQ Classic player would not have a personal botnet army at his disposal ready to launch a DDoS attack the moment his character got banned.
Ok it's not impossible, but as I said highly unlikely.
What is much more likely is that some highly antisocial individual is trying to pick an easy target he can attack, some target which has minimal resources with which to respond, that target is us. He wont attack a commercial enterprise because he is too afraid of the repercussions.
Currently he is bragging to his hacker mates that he has forced the Project1999 server offline (sorry Rogean, you are caught between a rock and a hard place here). It doesn't really matter who or what Project1999 is, Project 1999 has become a victim of its own success. If we didn't care then his attack would have no value and he would quickly move on to another target.
So what to do?
Unless you have a foolproof plan with which to effectively combat these DDoS attacks, put the server back online. If he cannot claim to have forced the server offline then you remove the purpose of his attacks. Eventually he will get bored, much sooner than your loyal EQ classic players. For a week, maybe two weeks, playing on the server will be unpleasant, but those who care will remain and after that he will be gone.
But the longer you keep the server offline, the longer he will continue his attack, and possibly his hacker friends will join in (if they haven't already).
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