Unfortunately though the majority seem to think differently, if you look at recent MMO releases and view their forums at release , one of the biggest complaints during release week has been queues. It seems to be a cycle that is repeated time and again in MMOs lately. Day one comes, there are huge queues to get onto the servers, people complain like mad, game X opens loads of new servers in order to stop the queues. Everyone is happy, 1 month later the 30 free days is up, significant numbers of people decide the game isnt for them and leave resulting in loads of empty and half empty servers and the userbase spread over too many servers because of all the extra servers they opened to stop people moaning about queues originally. People complain that servers arent populated, server transfers and server merges are implemented, the wider public views a game thats needing server merges as a "failing" game. That PR begins to whittle down the remaining userbase.
There is something to be said for a staggered release (I personally think it was a factor in the idea of pre-starts and early access etc which seemed to crop up several years ago). I guess for some people its the difference between not paying anything because its out of stock currently, and having paid something but not being able to actually play what you have already paid for because you cant log into the servers when you want to.
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Game could sell 1 million copies in its first month, need servers for 1 million players. 2nd month people need to start paying, only 50% decided they will, suddenly you have far too many servers, people who did decide to play suddenly find themselves playing on empty servers get bored and leave. EA learnt the hard way with Warhammer that meeting demand isnt always the best thing to do.
