[ckwang]

It's odd to me too. They had a great deal of pre-order information, something that most other server teams that face crazy launches don't ever have. I would guess that they could at least estimate the load to an order of magnitude. The fact that single player can't even be accessed is absurd, something that your comment on sharding hits on. The server teams at Blizzard should also have had some experience with this in their WoW trials and errors.