Quote Originally Posted by Serenitey View Post
Waited 6 hours to get in one Saturday. Not terrible. Cleaned house and made dinner while waiting. Just don't be so obsessed you melt down at the drop of a hat. Has it upset me to get one day of my "early access" - yes, but I'm not going to rage quit on it. My thought though is didn't they have enough time with this, delay and all, to prep for it? Prepare ahead of time to make sure this wouldn't happen? I mean, they to literally make millions as a company.
Somewhat of a timeline to put it in perspective:

SE plans to expand server and puts in motion new OCE servers (orders put in and teams put in motion to visit site as per their usual process), servers (I believe) were planned to be upgraded by 7.0 as well.
Semiconductor shortage starts, orders begin to be pushed out and delayed.
COVID hits, travel now severely obstructed and business shut down or heavily crippled while they adjust to the new norm of most of the workforce working from home
Shortage gets worse as not only does the demand increase but manufacture and supply are throttled by restrictions and worker shortage (people cannot/will not go in to work)
WoW community comes to a tipping point, big name "influencers" start to abandon ship and look to other content, FFXIV starts to grow exponentially in users, active players doubling in a couple months.
SE reacts, moving up plans to upgrade and trying to expedite orders for hardware and installations (these are again delayed due to continuing supply problems, even with extra money thrown at them)
It becomes painfully apparent that not only are the upgrades not going to happen in time for the expansion, they simply will not be available for several months. SE begins damage control and plans to optimize with what they have, repurposing previously "dev kit" hardware and capacity for the live game.

Expansion releases, you all know what happened here. It was bad. Servers overloaded, login server weaknesses brought into sharp relief. However the actual game itself, once a player is in is relatively stable and playable even with world servers running at full capacity.



The reality of the situation is that while SE COULD have thrown a bunch of money into upgrading to handle the current capacity 4 years ago, no company would have ever done that because the return on investment and projection of growth would , by any forecast of a reasonable person, not have warranted it. Up until this year the urgency to upgrade to the capacity necessary to make this whole thing not happen was not present and not foreseeable and once it was clear what was necessary the supply was already unavailable AND under a variety of factors is being extremely limited.



TL;DR: Nobody could have foreseen this happening and the "perfect storm" of crap the last 2 years have thrown at us has made it even worse.