OK, i was about 2 hours this morning, then had SERVER ERROR come up when the queue finished.. so i sighed and restarted, and it is now 4 hours later, and still in queue.

ROFL.. how in the world does rushing cause this problem? The problem is the amount of servers vs the amount of people who preordered. No amount of waiting means that the queues would be any reduced when you put the people in. They just stuffed up by not working out how many people they could hold on each server vs the amount of servers.. Seriously, the w/e betas were there TO stress test the servers, so they know how much they could hold.. so why in the world are they keeping server pops so low? Why wasnt this sorted BEFORE they went live?

ahhh... also on a guild chosen server... 1.5 hour long queue.. finally get to number 1.. and then SERVER error.... restart... you are now 1800th in the queue Errrrr.

Yeah except that Stephen Reid specifically said that it was not done as a stress test, and indeed that was the purpose of the previous beta weekends... The actual reason was so they could launch with the minimum amount of game servers needed, to prevent server merges in the future. This is pretty insane reasoning, as surely they can estimate how many preorders they have sold? It shows more that they perhaps have no faith that their product will be good enough in the medium term to keep their playerbase. Hello cost cutting as your main priority!

Well said.

Then why not just launch the prelaunch with more instances on starting areas?

And if they had have let everyone know in advance which wave they were going to be in..

I agree, the only way the launch could have gone smoother is if they had have let Noone in.. would have saved server costs and customer support as well!

More so, the only advantage that staggering gives you is to stifle the flood of servers opening, and to spread out the population... As Stephen Reid just put into the wave launch info.. there will be queues, so this launch hasn't solved the normal issues anyway.

Yep, the only thing staggered launch allows you to do is separate people from overpopulating areas in the beginning.. It just delays all other problems.

Yes I think there biggest concern was keeping costs down from the size of it, driven by the Marketing department (based on previous stickies and Stephen Reid).

I think you'll have to explicitely state what you mean, as i see no conflict. Yes more instances are more resource hungry, and yes your Master Server or however you handle coordinating the instances will have to have enough juice to run the amount of people , but that is not that hard to overcome depending on how you build the server client. Look at EvE for instance... they have done very well at managing having huge amounts of population spread across a single game server.. in fact they had to rethink a lot of traditionally server techniques to do that.

K last time i respond to you as you have no idea. Server resources = servers x power (very simple for you) As such, to add more resources in your server farm you obviously need ..... <blank> I'll let you fill that one in. What I meant was not to open up new GAME servers, but have a dynamic use of server resources to create more instances.

Terminals require a crapton of server resources, mainly enough RAM to service them. I am not saying 1 server = 1 shard at all. I am saying server resources split across shards.

It gets overtaxed if the shards are sharing a servers CPU's for sure, so adding servers (depending on the Server infrastructure/client) does fix the problem, and the cost as i said, is an investment.