Over the past couple of months, WoW has suffered from the "additional instances" problem caused by the instance servers basically becoming resource starved due to the number of people trying to launch instances. A "temporary fix" was put in place back after WotLK launch to prevent the instance lag and crashes that would trap players in dead/crashed instances, but it turned out to be not so "temporary" as here we are 8 months later, it's still in place, and the population in certain battlegroups has grown enough to cause the "additional instances can't be launched" message to become a common sight for many players. Despite knowing that this day would come, when the problem first started showing up in June Blizzard told people who complained about it "working as intended", and indeed avoided doing anything other than explaining how the instance caps works up until mid July. The current solution appears to be hardware reconfiguration of database servers, but even that is a stop gap measure as it only opens up a few more slots... people on "patched" servers are still seeing this error message during "peak hours".
The entire situation has been a failure of capacity planning/engineering and managing customer relations, and while I can't speak for everyone else affected by it, personally I've lost a lot faith in Blizzard's overall competence at a time when you guys are apparently moving to a subscription model where customers will be heavily reliant on your competence to play their purchased games.
What steps are you guys taking to make sure that this isn't repeated in the future? Have you addressed the instance capacity issue in the expansion by creating a high availability system for the instance servers? Have your customer support policies been modified in any way to provide players with more information on service failures in a timely (ie, less than 3 months) manner? Have your program managers at least learned that they should pay attention to their developers when they say stuff like, "This could end up biting us in the ass in 6 months. I'd like to take some time and a team and improve this code..."?
In short: why should I, as a customer, trust you with a subscription payment ever again?
