[roc]

Which never seems to come around, because the new hardware is so much faster that it can host what were previously problematic server loads without a problem, and you've got a million other things to write.

Yet players have a tendency to figure out when places are too overcrowded to be fun. So your old problematic load is almost never representative of how many players wanted to be in that area, but merely how many players were willing to put up with that level of degraded performance.

So upon release (or sufficiently close to it to start stress testing, which is conveniently when it's too late to really change architecture) the new limits are quickly hit.