Yes... yes yes yes! And every developer gives the same promises "We don't wanna see this happening, so we've taken appropriate steps in order to prevent it from happening" aaand then they're overcrowded with queues, lag and all other bs, hahah
However, I didn't experience any of that in the beta.. given I don't know how many people there actually were though.

I`m pretty sure this game will be a huge sucess at release. Everybody wants to but Elder Scrolls Online..but like any MMORPG peopel will start quitting to play other games. It will be just a matter of time until the game becomes free to play.

You wno't have to worry about it. 8 million people will NOT be playing for long.

You never know. It really depends on how good the game is and how much content it posses, how good it is and how much time of gameplay it give to players.

I imagine if the game becomes mega popular, the extra subscriptions will go towards obtaining and maintaining more server racks.

It's done with racks.

http://www.computing.co.uk/IMG/954/168954/facebook-open-compute-server-racks.jpg

Note that the last beta was only on the US server. The EU server will take around half of the load. It will also give EU players less lag.

The megaserver system can add an unlimited number of shard servers but it still need an system to load balance and allocate players.

It this system is pushed to hard you get wait times to zones, if the shard servers work to hard you get lag on actions like attacks.

It won't but I'll eat crow if it does. There's just too many hurdles that this MMO has to go over. It really svcks if you think about it.

If this does succeed, then Zenimax will need to be on their A game because Blizzard hasn't been wasting their time just releasing expansions for WOW, they have something cooked up. Destiny is also going to be a problem and if this MMO will succeed and get the numbers that the OP is talking about, which I think won't happen. It's going to need to happen before Destiny comes out. I just don't see that happening although I will eat crow if it does.

The point is it could become a mega hit...don't just knock it before release because of reviews after three hours of gameplay. WoW became hugely successful and had a ridiculous peak sub number, but if you weren't there at the beginning, it started pretty bad. They didn't just blow up to 8 million or so during the first month (or even the first year for that matter). For those who remember the vanilla game, instances like Zul'Aman (that IIRC was supposed to be part of launch) wasn't even released until the second content patch I believe. Go back and look at all the 1.x patches for WoW and you will realize how much they added over those first couple of years.

In response to the OP, the goal of the Mega Server (sounds like an old Power Rangers morph) is to make the population around the player hopefully never feel too crowded or scarce, regardless of user fluxuations.

What I don't quite understand is this: Say 1 million people are playing at the same time. Say 1/3 of those people are playing each alliance. Say out of that 1/3. 150,000 people are all in Daggerfall. Now surely it must be split somehow into shards because you aren't going to have 150,000 people all using the same chat channel. So what is the population cap for each "shard"? How many people would you actually be chatting with? Does each shard have access to the same Cyrodiil campaigns, or are each of the campaigns the same size as a shard?

After 3 betas I am still confused about this.

But whatever they are doing, it feels right.

The population in both PvE and Cyrodiil felt... perfect.

Maybe each shard has roughly the same population as an old fassioned "server"