Sunstriker spent 8 minutes banging his head, his horses head actually, on Shadowfang Keep’s instance portal. He gained no access.
“Additional instances cannot be launched, please try again later.”
I think by “later” they mean “when hell freezes over.” Because I’ve been trying for four days now.
What, are they out of instances?
Hardly.
Msaker logged on, at the Argent Tournament, he went to the coliseum, and instantly entered the Trial of the Champions instance.
Login, go.
That means old world instances are closed. Totally.
And they’ve got ToC instances available, and waiting in the wings for anyone and everyone to enter and have a go.
This means, in effect, Blizzard has shut down old world instances, and is devoting 100% of their resources, with capacity to spare, to the level 80 content.
They’ve gone one Expansion further than they can handle. Just exactly what are they selling at BlizzCon? They can’t handle what they’ve got. They’re going to add more? Not without jettisoning something.
Is the Cataclysm of the next Expansion the destruction of Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms? At this point what would they lose? Folks, you heard it here first.
This problem was happening before ToC and 3.2 came along. But it wasn’t a complete lock out of the early instances like we have now.
So, advice to a new player to the game: Have your level 80 main get you heirloom shoulders, chest, and weapon. No level 80 main? Ooooh, that’s going to suck.
No, I’m seriously annoyed about this.
You know if you’ve gone to the store, and you see the proprietor in the back of the store, as you peer in through the dusty glass, which is locked and denying you access inside, and you see him trying to hide in a corner to avoid you, I mean, c’mon. They ought to show you, the customer, some respect and at least post a CLOSED FOR BUSINESS sign on the entrance. “I CAN SEE YOU! OPEN UP!” And then you see them hunker down further and in a squeaky voice say “Nobody here but us mice. Sorry. Nobody’s here. Come back later.”
I’m calling shenanigans.
Kinless Chronicles 
This sound more like bad allocation of resources. To me it sound like Blizzard is allocating a certain number of threads for each instances. Instead of having a pool of threads that all instances pull from.
I haven’t tried any old world instances in a long time but I waited half an hour last night for H ToC. There was about 50 people waiting outside banging their heads against the portal. I agree with Ogre though, I think that it is based off Allocation. They have more resources for the heroics and new raids then for the older raids. I can’t really blame them for that though.
If you want to blame someone blame the 80’s who have nothing better to do but run through old world instances slaughtering everything because they are bored. That allocates what little resources there are for one person instead of 5, 10, 25.
Which reminds me that my 80 Warrior has some Righteous Orbs to farm up still. Yeah, I can see how the allocations have gotten out of whack by our maturing.
It’s fine with me if they close the older instances as long as they’d let me start my character at 55 or even higher than that and not force me to slog through, playing SOLO mind you, a barren devoid-of-players game in the lower levels. I mean, I was all excited about BG experience only to find that it’s not even 30% of what I’d get for questing and grinding mobs for the same amount of time put in. And running a dungeon at levels 1-58? forget about it, you might get one or two groups even attempting any of those dungeons, and most of the time one of the group members alt-F4’s out because they “have to go to naxx, sry”.
FWIW, I jumped right into both Scholomance and Stratholme on Wednesday night, with no issue. Maybe it’s a 5-man thing?
Just me and the wife. And I was trying to get in solo before she wasted her time logging on.
Though the problem is widespread… it apparantly doesn’t affect every server. Be glad if you aren’t on one with this issue 😛