The overflow shard seem to be an interesting answer. If they had no problems with WvW participation, they could design the number of normal shards for number of players after 3 month (or another appropriate) time and just make a lot of overflow shards for the launch.

I think that maybe 80% from pre-purchases were at BW3, a lot of people want save the surprises for the launch (and are saying it, one or two bloggers just wrote it). With more 200 k free keys, I guess we saw around 1 million at BW3. Remember too that not everyone entered at the first hour and some players had a lot of problems for log into the first hours of BW3.

They were having Overflow servers at all starting areas the first hours, but we never know how many overflow areas are active. The fact that they launched asura and sylvari too make problable at least half of pre-purchases invaded that starting zones. SSo, while human, charr and norn areas were problably relativelly empty, my experience at BW3 was that both asura and sylvari zones were full, with each DE being hammered to death by 30-40 players…. the Force of Zerg was strong at that BW3.

Now at beta tests only the pre-purchasers can enter. As the sytarting time for the beta test changes and people have RL and how it is only 4 hours (one was only 1 hour), my guess is that only 60% is trying the stress tests. That makes around 600 k players, but I think there are players doing the pre-purchase now only for enter the stress tests and have the 3 days headstart. So, can be a higher number.

The first two stress test had a strange lag happening, something not present at any BW. It was a lot strange because only bNorth America was having that problem and some players said that GW1 too was having the same lag at same time the GW2 stress test was happening.Then Anet come to a forum and explained they detected a problem at a database that was causing that lag. Then we had a one hour stress test the next day and it had no lag.

That problem with a database for both GW1 and GW2 show they are using the thecnology that kalex716 explained. But too make me guess they are adding all databases they can get for deal with the flood of players.

Last stress test was smooth for me, but some people reported a bug at character creation. Everyone was having long time loading when changing zones. But they have time for more stress tests until 25th, aparently they are trying be sure they will have a smooth launch.

spinks, from what I am seeing at stress tests, I doubt we will have problems with launch at 25th (each beta test is a training for 25th) and 27th (players from 25th will spread to other zones) and it is problable we will not see any issues at 28th, because that day Blizzard is helping GW2….

I get that many people would skip the betas, but 1.1m is enough that even a sizeable proportion wanting to spend time in the game would have been a massive load.

1) Tell everyone to be patient

2) Panic and open lots of new servers

3) Be surprised after numbers decline at the 3 month mark

4) ???

I think it is exactly what Anet is doing, storing the data on central dataservers.

The toon names are global, the guilds are global and there is a “guest” system where you can visit friends at otehr server (but cannot go to PvP).

They structured diferent servers just for make the server X server PvP.

It’s entirely possible now adays to store character data on a central database/server and migrate the data over dynamically to servers in a load balanced way.

Its not 1999 anymore.

aparently MMO market is working that way, there is a game everyone try clone.

Anyway, we need a change of model. SWTOR, TSW and a lot of new MMO are suffering because they are WoW-clones. IMHO, that is a dead end.

A new paradigm will be good to the market. Mostly because WoW is starting to die (I doubt MoP wil stop the subscription hemorraging) and if a new paradigm do’nt appear, teh MMO genre will die.