The server hardware itself is not sufficient.

There are too many players in a single zone

There are some code/software issues that only showed themselves in situations of crazy numbers



Fellow Adventurers,after the very hectic launch week has passed, we like to give you some background information on server performance.Prior to release, we created several forecast scenarios about post-launch player population. We also upgraded our hardware to the maximum level possible.As it turned out, even our most optimistic forecasts about player numbers where exceeded significantly.This caused a set of issues. Our goal is to fix most or all of them over the next 5-10 days.In general, there is three areas in which problems can occur:1. is not the issue at all. The number or power of servers has nothing do to with the problems that we have seen in launch week, and no amount of "extra servers" would make a difference. You can see that for yourself when checking performance in non-overcrowded zones, these run really well.2. is a significant problem. If there is more than 1.100 players in a zone, the zone starts lagging. This is a hard technical limit, and the only solution to this is to reduce that number on a per zone basis. We will use the Caerleon solution for this, i.e. have the bank and market place sit inside a separate mini-cluster underground.Another option would be to split the main cities into multiple districts, or rework the Royal Continent to have more than 5 main cities. However, that is not something that we can do on short notice.3. was not a problem in general, we did not see any of these issues during our beta tests. They have started appearing due to the crazy numbers we are seeing. This is something that our coders are focusing all their attention on right now and we are expecting significant improvements here soon.Now, on a more general level, we could tackle the issues that we have right now by reducing the number of players that the servers allow at the moment. However, this would mean that thousands or players would have to wait in queues. We made the decision that we'd rather have the occasional server outage instead.In addition to the technical matters, we will also look into game balance to deal with the overcrowding of certain zones. In particular, we'll look into the respawn rates of resources and might give them a temporary boost while such a large number of players stands at the same progression levels, competing over the same resources.Kind regards,Stefan