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"We broke everything. We plead guilty.Our Baby Tauren Army had 897 baby Taurens, peacefully hanging out and dancing. We had a fifty-five level 70s in two raids, ready to plow the way into Stormwind. Then, at the appointed hour of 6pm EST, we started for Ratchet, and the lag started. GMs started whispering people in our newly-formed guild, telling us of dire consequences if our actions didn't stop.Had we spoken directly with a GM, we imagine the conversation would've gone like this:\"Dear BRK. Shut it down. Love, the Blizz GMs.\"\"But it's just a little lag...\"\"You don't understand. You have 1000 people in your raids. The Alliance has 300 or so people guarding Stormwind...\"\"Three hundred?\"\"Almost all 70s, too. Couple of raids full. We can't handle that PvP battle, the server is already wobbly. Shut it down now, spread out, do something or... just do something.\"\"You got it, we're done. Crashing servers is not what we want to do.\"So we ended it, as soon as we were told to end it. But it wasn't soon enough, Argent Dawn was locked to new character creation, and then, we think, rebooted.The authenticator server going off-line? Was that a result of our raid? No idea, but let's just assume it was.We did it. We apologize.Many people have said that choosing Argent Dawn was a bad idea from the beginning. Our friends there assured us that weekends, especially at our 6pm start time, shouldn't be bad at all. And it really wasn't. There was never a login issue or lag problem, until we started running to Ratchet. Yes, then stuff started hitting the fan.But what we heard was that it was the potential for further catastrophe that concerned Blizz the most, not the current situation. Yes there were disconnects, by the truck load. But as the army spread out, things calmed down. We are assuming they shut us down and rebooted the server to prevent anything worse from happening. Although we've said it many times, we never once considered crashing the server a goal. Quite the contrary, we wanted to keep it up so we could have our battle at Stormwind. The fact that it was shut down neither pleases nor thrills us. We may be guilty of many things, but schadenfreude is not one of them.If you were adversely affected, we're very sorry for your troubles; it was not intentional. If you joined the raid and were disappointed we didn't make it to Stormwind, we wish things had gone better. If you were part of the Alliance raid waiting for us, you just lucked out, (we would've cleaned your clock.)But above all, regardless if you're angry or happy, we hope that you chose to make a small donation to our cause. No matter what you may think of us, we hope you didn't let that affect your decision to help a sick child.Now please excuse us, we're gonna pull a Yoda and disappear for a while.Oh. If you want to flame us, we can handle that. But if you want to flame our cause, think twice. Please."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.engadget.com/2008/11/08/bigredkitty-an-open-apology-to-everybody/>