No offense taken. I will attempt to address your concerns. I guess I should have included my reasoning for why I believe it has something to do with GamerGate.erttheking said:No offense, I read your post and it is entirely speculation. Speculation is not what happened. I'm not going to change my opinion on a group for something I don't know that they did with 100% certainty. I am not taking sides in this clusterfuck unless those sides are based on solid facts. Too many rampant emotions have caused too many tears already for me to let myself fall into the same pitfall.
Heck, a good part of your argument hinges on the assumption that this attack even had anything to DO with Gamer Gate! Where's the evidence that it does? We've seen plenty of attacks on online games in the past done for laughs, why is this one automatically different?
It's all to do with two things. If it was only a random attack on an online gaming site, that means that the choice of target and the choice of time should be independent of the current GamerGate-related events.
There are many gaming-related websites, but the only website which has agreed to every demand made by the GamerGate protesters is attacked. You could count the statistical probability of picking Escapist by dividing one (representing the one choice, that is Escapist) by the number of possible choices. Even if only the major websites are included, it's a small number. Consider also that from all pages under the escapistmagazine domain, exactly the GamerGate thread was targeted. How much more certain do we need to be?
Then there's also the timing. Out of all the times of the year, the attack is made while GamerGate is a hot topic and especially one day after there was an e-mail dump in which Kuchera and Tito argued over banning policies at the Escapist forums. This probability is also very small.
You then have to multiply these small probabilities with each other to get the probability that the attack is unrelated to GamerGate. I haven't made the calculations, but it should be obvious that it's a VERY small number. You could do the whole hypothesis-testing thing with p-values thing that statisticians do, I believe, and you should get the result that we should not reject the hypothesis that the attack is related to GamerGate.