“Turns out you should totally be talking to your server engineers when you have a plan like this.”
Jump ahead to 24:15 in the video World of Warcraft: Looking for Group to see the discussion of implementing the Gates of Ahn’Qiraj patch. It consisted of a large event per server that brought tons of people together, so much that CPUs were maxing out and servers were crashing.
As part of the discussion, this video gives a look inside the cage of one of their US datacenters, the servers, and a brief mention of some of the technical architecture that brings it all together.
“We try not to tell the developers ‘no’ unless physics gets in the way.”