If you're unhappy with other players or the results of a raid, don't take it out on the game's servers, or you could wind up in a US jail. Take it from Calin Mateias, a 38-year-old Romanian man who was just sentenced to one year in federal prison for launching a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against "World of Warcraft's" European servers in 2010. According to the US Department of Justice, Mateias launched the attacks between February and September 2010 after clashing with other WoW players for a variety of reasons, including the division of loot and membership in raid teams. His attacks were successful, causing WoW servers to crash and preventing some paying users from being able to access the game. Mateias was indicted in 2011 and has been in custody since Nov. 20 after being extradited from Romania. He pleaded guilty in February to one count of intentional damage to a protected computer.

A hacker was sentenced on Monday to a year in federal prison for disrupting one of the most popular video games of all time, the U.S. Department of Justice announced in a press release. A 38-year-old Romanian national named Calin Mateias had been in custody since November for coordinating a series of distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks in "World of Warcraft" seven years earlier. Mateis was extradited from Romania last year and pleaded guilty to a charge of intentional damage to a protected computer, according to the Justice Department. His crime was deliberately slowing down or even shutting down "World of Warcraft" servers earlier this decade out of spite for other players of the massive online game. A DDoS attack is when a hacker overloads a server with traffic to cause a logjam for anyone trying to access it, according to Scientific American.

One World of Warcraft player is paying the price for taking a virtual rivalry too far. A US federal court has sentenced Romanian man Calin Mateias to spend a year in federal prison after he pleaded guilty to launching a distributed denial of service attack against WoW's servers in response to being "angered" by one player. The 2010 traffic flood knocked thousands of players offline and cost Blizzard $30,000 (which Mateias repaid in April) in recovery expenses. A defense sentencing memorandum claimed that Mateias had been spurred by a "juvenile desire to win the game." That's not really how the online role-playing title works (there's no definitive victory over fellow players, and they don't lose when they're offline), but you get the idea -- it was reportedly a hotheaded decision.