How? The queues are not due to hardware limitations. The queues are artificial limits intentionally deployed to try and limit runaway populations that would likely never be able to be reigned in enough to disable layering, a promise for Phase 2. Blizzard could easily increase population limits by several fold as it is if they chose. In fact, they already have at least twice. But it’s a dangerous decision and is not ideal at all. People moving OFF overcrowded servers is best for long-term game and community health (nothing to do with technical or hardware limitations).
Source: Overcrowded Realm Update
While we are able to fit several times more players on a single realm in 2019 than was the case in 2006, we are not going to raise that cap any further, even though we have the technical capacity to do so. Raising realm caps would simply forestall the problem, letting more players in at launch but creating an unsustainable situation down the line, with severe queues when we turn off layering permanently before Phase 2 of our content unlock plan.
Agreed to a degree. Vanilla built communities because it was a much smaller population per-server than what we have now. Specifically, a population that the vanilla content world was tuned and designed around. However, that’s sort of what Blizzard is gambling on happening (and I agree). That a notable amount of people will leave over the first 60-90 days after launch and then the populations will settle at something comfortable that doesn’t necessitate layering to provide sufficient mobs/nodes/world space to comfortable play within.
The problem and solution has absolutely nothing to do with hardware limitations.