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> So what went wrong? The short answer is: a lot more people logged on than we expected. More people played and played in ways we never saw in the beta.

How can the play style of people have such an impact on the servers?

Sure there could have been people spamming buildings in order to produce high traffic. But that's sounds like an unlikely exceptional case.

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This part really confused me as well. The other thing that I was confused with(as someone who played the beta) was if they knew play style could have an effect on server load, why did they have such a restrictive beta? The beta was short and greatly limited what you were able to do, so it seems logical that it would not give a fair representation of how people would play the game. I think if play style was an issue then they made the mistake of using the beta as a marketing tool, rather then as a method of testing the game/system.

My guess is "play style" is being used more generally to refer to how long they play the game during a session and how frequently their game sessions are.

Probably they spent more time playing on the highest game speed, which taxes their servers more. They eventually disabled this speed when it was clear their infrastructure could not handle it.

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