Additional Instances Cannot Be Launched

You can read more about our plans in the thread linked and quoted below. We do recognize that this negatively impacts our players and are taking measures to address instance capacity issues as quickly as possible.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=18031082483&sid=1

Q u o t e:
We are aware of the concerns regarding situations where players are unable to zone into an instance due to an instance limit being hit, which results in a message stating that additional instances cannot be launched. This limit was implemented as a short-term solution to preserve the gameplay for players who are already in an instance and to prevent numerous issues that can happen when too many instances are active at the same time, but we are currently working on better solutions to ensure that players can get into instances when they want to.

As one of the solutions to this situation, we are in the process of modifying our hardware setup to allow for more instances to be active without negatively impacting the performance of these instances. Once this hardware reconfiguration is complete, we expect to see a noticeable reduction in the number of players hitting the instance limit. However, this improvement to the hardware is a complicated and delicate process that will also require extensive testing before it can be fully implemented, so it may be some time before the updates can be completed. We would like to assure you that this issue currently a top priority for us, and we are working on resolving it as quickly as possible.

Further information and updates regarding this will be provided as we make progress in this process. Thank you for your patience during this time.

Q u o t e:
Blue thanks for your response. I would like to point out however that the post was made 07/02/2009 09:00:07 AM PDT. That is now over a month and 4 days, which is equal to 1 full month of subscriptions.

Restructuring our hardware across all realms and battlegroups without excessive amounts of down time is a very long and tedious process. It's definitely something that is a high priority for us to fix, but it's complicated -- even beyond my own understanding of our hardware. While we are aware that this is greatly affecting players, there is a limitation on the expedience at which such massive restructuring of our hardware systems can be accomplished.

While we typically try and refrain from having several threads on single topics, this thread has gotten very long and unwieldy. Given the fact that I didn't want any updates to get lost in the shuffle here (we'll see if this post does), I made several responses to another thread about the instance capacity issue. At the request of some players, I'm referencing in this thread the responses I provided here:

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=19110419026&pageNo=1&sid=1#2

To summarize, we are preparing a detailed update for players on the progress of addressing instance capacity issues affecting select realms.

We have made a new post pertaining to this subject. Please direct further conversation to this new stickied thread.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=19109959718&sid=1