Server capacity

3.1 released last night. I made special effort to clear my schedule, logged on early, paid for dual-spec, respecced, set up both specs. I even set up Major Glyphs for my holy spec although I couldn't figure out which Minor Glyphs I should have (Lay on Hand and ?). I cleaned up my inventory, checked consumeables, repaired, got symbols and headed off to Icecrown.

And sat there. Periodically trying to zone in to Ulduar and getting kicked out with the "instance not available" message. After about an hour or so, we gave up and decided to try to raid it tonight instead. I poked around on the forums as we waited and found a blue post indicating that their instance servers simply couldn't keep up with the demands to create new instances.

I wondered about why that was. Maybe the relative ease of Naxx meant that a much higher proportion of warcraft players were ready to set foot in Ulduar the moment it released? Or maybe the extra extended maintenance time meant even more groups were trying to get started at the same time. Normally, you probably see a distributed range of raid start times, but obviously a lot of people were trying to get in just as we were, which is later than most.

Hopefully it'll be sorted out for tonight.

In a somewhat curious contrast, I realized this morning that I never finished up submitting my taxes. I did them online via turbotax a few days ago, but wanted to check a few last things with my wife before sending them in. I was worried that their servers would be overwhelmed on tax day and I had this clever idea of doing it post-raid last night -- who'd be doing taxes at 2am? Well, fewer of us anyway. But disappointed with the raid not going, I forgot and so I was a little nervous this morning at 9am when I logged on to their site. But it worked fine. Not even any real lag or anything. I guess their servers held up just fine.

There might be 11million warcraft players, but there are probably more people than that who file their taxes on April 15th. Something for Blizzard to think about. ;)