Why do I hear.....

[Quark]

Let's do the math here.... 500,000 players on 40+ servers.... Let's say there are 50, just to give them the benefit of the doubt....

40 'servers' is probably a much bigger number of hardware machines. For instance, I know I heard a blizzard rep say that Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms are on different pieces of hardware. The item-style lag that has been prevalent indicates that if items aren't done on a seperate server altogether, it's at least a multiprocessor server (Anyone doing stuff with items is dying with lag, while they see everything else going on like normal).

I don't know of a single network that can sustain 500,000 people hitting it, nor a server that can handle 10,000 people without running out of memory after the first 1500 people sign on.  Then, what's the cost of one of these servers, let alone 40+ for a beta?  How big of a gamble is Blizzard making on the success of this game? 

I think that there's a lot more at stake here for Blizzard than we think....

There's probably more systems involved in this than the simple '40 servers'. The fact that there's login issues for all realms right now itself leads to the thought that a seperate login server is shared between realms.

On the other hand, Blizzard has also mentioned that they are purposely not running at full capacity, so that they can stress the servers and try to break them beforehand. I heard that they have a fix for the item-lag issue in hand, so it's obvious why problems now is a good thing.