Originally Posted by
Ayrie
I'll chime in a little here.
New servers: not as hard as you'd think to implement. Most likely they have backup images of all types of game servers (login, servers, dungeon). This allows them to quickly repair a damaged or corrupted server, and in this case allows them to quickly take a server out of the box, image it, and force it into a cluster. They're also likely using virtual clustering and virtual servers, which allows them to take say 5 servers and virtually shard that cluster into 20 servers, or whatever numbers you'd like to use. That makes the baseline imaging of a new machine even easier given that the existing cluster can shift the virtual machines around as needed (or manually) to balance the load.