Was this a RuneScape private server (RSPS)? I remember back in the day you could find a free RSPS DDoS tool with a quick Google search, and all you had to do was enter the public IP address to start attacking. The culture for the RSPS scene was exactly what you're describing.
Also there was another kind of attack where you would start thousands of bot clients at once that would spam messages. The hopes would be that you would (a) shut down the server, (b) attract the players to the server your bots were advertising
Not runescape, it was an old MMO that got abandoned, we modded the game kept it alive for almost 8 years before most of the Admins quit and we started our own company, last I heard the game is still running.
As for the DDoS tools, after writing the parent comment just did a quick ddg search and you can still find several websites advertising services to DDoS. Some I recognize from back then.
On a side-note doing a nslookup shows some of these sites are behind cloudflare haha.
>>Also there was another kind of attack where you would start thousands of bot clients at once that would spam messages. The hopes would be that you would (a) shut down the server, (b) attract the players to the server your bots were advertising
I wondered when I'd see a mention of RSPSs on here. God what an excellent time of my life that was. Running a server with my brother got me into programming and tech and was such an absolute pleasure. We had the good fortune of never being DDoSed but I suppose our scale was small enough to avoid it (20 players max at any given time). I had never heard about the tool you're mentioning.
Haha I'm in the exact same boat - creating my own server got me into programming and tech.
A common tool was called Syipkpker[0]. It was really annoying dealing with these bots. All you could do is IP-ban them and pray the attacker didn't change their IP
Also there was another kind of attack where you would start thousands of bot clients at once that would spam messages. The hopes would be that you would (a) shut down the server, (b) attract the players to the server your bots were advertising