As far as I can tell the lessons we can learn from this launch are:
- If you actually care about customer reaction, like Star Wars: The Old Republic Online you can easily make sure you have enough servers available and the launch is smooth as a baby's bottom. Hah! Noobs. Don't do this. You're Blizzard. You don't care. You don't have to.
- If you know everyone will buy the game anyhow you can get away with having the minimal number of servers and then slowly build it up to match.
- Make the game online only then purposely limit the number of servers (they cost money!) so that even single player is crippled.
- Anyone stupid/hardcore enough to pre-order will forgive you. We already know this from World of Warcraft (mea culpa).
- Though you've experienced crippling server shortages with every single launch, ignore it (see the next item).
- Bobby will have a screaming tantrum if you overspend one cent on servers before there's a crisis.
- You've had a beta, you know how many people each server can handle, and thanks to the digital age you know how many pre-orders you have to at least within a factor of two. Ignore all those numers. Pretend you haven't seen them (see the previous item). You can make do with that Pentium 4 as the login server for launch.
- Instead of having queues, which are annoying but at least are predictable and deterministic, implement a semi-random MAC-like backoff algorithm. Now you can claim your game doesn't have login queues.
- Error 37
- Error 37
- Error 37
- You will still make craptons of money, reinforcing this cycle.
Executive Elevator Summary: utter contempt for your users = $$$
No, I didn't buy this since I saw it coming, but I'm following the carnage and getting more amusement from it than the people who bought the game. Not a single person I know who bought it has been able to play it since the beta ended. They've gone to sleep, shedding tears of blood.