Quote Originally Posted by Ayrie View Post
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.
You want to be careful with adding new servers to play on in the first month. It is a easy solution, but you want to avoid another Warhammer and Age of Conan. These two games where also very crowded in the early days of the launch so they added tons of new servers to handle the high demand of players. Sadly after 1 month, max 2 months most players had left the game and they where left with many ghost servers where only a hand full of players played on. And that in turn made the entire game look more deserted then it was, causing more players to leave and discourage new players to try and find a home in those games.