Wrath of the Lich King details from 1UP

[LochnarITB]

I'd be more worried about the extra rows in the databases than the server space. Not from a space perspective so much as a speed perspective. WoW can handle what it does, but from past events we've seen it can't handle much more.

Oh, come on. The game programmers would have to be complete idiots if they keep all the toons on all the accounts live in the active game database so it should have zero affect on game performance. And, the database programmers should be fired if the account query database isn't robust enough to handle an order of magnitude more entries than were perceived to possibly populate a server. Even if it was all designed to be as fragile as that, it was still a poor choice made at design time. Any knowledge of gamers should have said that, given the number of classes, alliance -vs- horde, and some specs playing almost like different classes, there would be gamers that want them all and were willing to put in the time to build them. It was easily foreseeable that 10 would be a roadblock for many players. It still plays out that it was an arbitrary choice and they won't change it because they don't hear enough people yelling about it.