They are doing insane hardware upgrades for a huge amount of players. However what happens when those players get bored and move on after a few months and hte population drops from 280k to 150k? Servers don't cost millions, probably around 15k per world server since I'm sure they're buying in bulk and have agreements iwth manufacturers. Server transfers won't require a server to be taken down, logistically it's not that bad. However it's not a priority, there's other stuff that takes precedence.

Worlds are still closed because they opened new worlds, why have 10k people trying to log into one server and 300 in another? You'd close the 10k until the 300 server filled up a bit more.


Yes SE has repeatively flopped on the last few launches, however it's not 100% their fault, and not 100% due to negligence. 1.0 was rushing to hit a holiday deadline, and had a design that wasn't fully tested. But SE has a history of paving the way with games and making it work. When ffxi came out, that game was completely different than anything. But players adapted. 1.0's launch didn't fail due to bugs, but rather players didn't want to adapt. Kind of a new concept for them being that gamers have eaten up everything they've thrown out there for decades. So they tried to redesign, and it was rocky. Eventually they said we'll scrap it and start over. This time, it's been a few years since anything mmo related has come to market, players are looking for something new and hte only one offering it is SE. So instead of getting their 1.0 population to come back, they now have thousands upon thousands more, which they entirely didn't anticipate. Plus I'm sure they're being extremely budget conscious after all the money they lost on 1.0, so they surely didn't want to over-buy, they probably went where htey thought was 10-20% under, and would upgrade accordingly, only to get 50-60% over and had to upgrade significantly.