Just to nip this into the bud right now. Do not turn this thread into conjecture on Blizzard's perceived success of lack of quality control or version management. Unless you're on the development team there, you don't have the even the slightest knowledge or evidence to make an informed decision about their processes.

Was 3.0.8 released with issues? Yes. Were those issues addressed in a timely manner? Yes.

This thread is a good place to discuss issues and problems with the changes in 3.0.8, but its not the place to harp on Blizzard with wildly inaccurate guesses or theories on their development processes.

I'm going to leave my previous comment as my final word on that subject other than to note one doesn't have to be on the development team to have knowledge of what goes on in it.

That said, 3.0.8 still has issues. On our realm -- and many others from reading the official forums a bit -- there are spontaneous, often extensive bouts of server-wide on zone-wide lag. They sometimes affect the world outside of instances, sometimes hit instance servers, etc. Realm performance was sometimes spotty pre 3.0.8. It appears to be similarly spotty now. What changes they introduced that caused the new set of problems, I don't know. But basic stability had been something we could take for granted throughout most of TBC and even into Wrath's release. And that's no longer a given.

Similarly, things like the "too many instances have been launched, please try again later" situation are still present in game. Rather than state categorically whether that's an instance-server capacity issue or not, let's just agree that it shouldn't be happening.

??

Yes you do, and Zoid is completely right.

I disagree with him that the issues with the 3.08 patch have all been fixed, but speculating about what goes on at Blizzard is retarded.

Dude, I don't care if you think this should happen or not. And most would think it shouldn't happen.

But, when everyone and there mother is solo zoning into dungeons all over the world to go visit this random old person with a glowing light to collect one single coin, then yes this will happen. This is no different than first two-three days of Hallow's End.

No company in there right mind will build a whole extra server farm just for the handful of days a year, that they need an extra 20%-40% more capacity. You simply limit the number, and add a small delay, to everyone.
People will bitch and grumble, and the day will move on. (And note this has no relation to the 3.0.8 lag or WG lag)

Why not? Was WoW profitable on release, back in 2004? Since then computer performance has more than quadrupled for the same cost. I really don't understand why blizzard would have any problem matching or exceeding the server capabilities required to handle the busiest days of the year in game and still make a profit, given how cheap servers are now compared to 4 years ago.

The "too many instances" problem pre-dates the start of Lunar Festival by weeks, at least on our realm (which occasionally has short but real queues in prime time). I can't be sure of how widespread it is across realms, but I imagine it's not limited to Stormrage (US).

There were similar server shortage capacity problems in arenas back in Seasons 2 and 3 that caused queues to be even longer than the matching would require, especially on Mondays. Ultimately they were solved by adding server capacity for arenas.

The game does a lot more processing now than it used to - even just looking at things like debuff slots and bag space. That said, I'm not sure that this is a productive discussion for us.

EU Realm, no queues (except right when LK hit), Medium Population according to the Realm Selection list. We have the [More Instances Cannot Be Launched] thing as well. One can hardly say it's limited to high population realms. It's been going on for ages now (and can be fairly annoying on a PvP server).

I had thought instance servers were shared among battlegroups. I would be very surprised if each realm had its own instance server.

On our server you can be bashing your head against an instance portal for 10 minutes or more before you are allowed to zone in. It's definitely a huge problem.

Elders of the Dungeons might only be a partial culprit to the congestion of the instance servers. And as many have stated it might be possible that blizzard is running out of physical space / power in their datacenters - two issues which are much harder to fix than just buying a few new clusters and run a network install on them while drinking soda.

Removing World Event achievements that are bound to non-heroic instances might be a step into the right direction though.

Also have in mind all the regular Dungeon achievements. People in my guild are soloing Azeroth instances pretty often to get these achievements, or farming Strat for the baron's mount.

The achievement system has overall introduced a bigger demand for previously obsolete instanced content, not necessarily tied to world events.

Hi. People seemed to have forgotten Zoid's post here.

They should make portals from Orgrimmar and Stormwind to Dalaran to stop people from using the "free hs" instances. In general i think it's possible part of the problem is instances that are being kept open but not used. Depending on how their load balancing works, they could still be using a lot of resources, and somehow figuring out what instances will not be used again and releasing them could help a lot.