We talked about pre-orders and we think it’s a good idea, but we probably won’t offer them until we officially announce the release date.

You’ll definitely get an E-peen™ for it and we were thinking of letting people in a day early. It’s funny that I thought of that, considering now people are talking about staggered releases Log in to see images!

I think we will do our best to stagger the people who come back to play: we plan to send out emails to inactive accounts for example, but we can do that in a set amount per day, rather than risk having tens of thousands come to the site all at once.

In terms of adding servers, unfortunately we are at the point right now where doing so with our existing host means getting a dedicated rack and that would probably triple our costs to run the site, and it’s not like we can just do that for a month or two then go back to our old way of doing it.

One option I’ve been considering is moving the site to Amazon EC2, where I can allocate and deallocate servers as needed and pay by the hour. Unfortunately I would have to learn a bunch of stuff to get that set up in time!