We had another meeting with Sony to discuss the results of our recent server code change to improve the situation. We have a working model of the situation and we will continue to see what we can do server side before the client patch comes out.
We will be testing an approach which means that many clients (99%) won’t get assigns for a while, allowing the remaining 1% to get work. Once they have work, they’ll go away crunching, allowing a new 1% to get work. If all goes well, all should get work without all pounding the server simultaneously.
The new client will take care of this automatically (as this is already done in the non-PS3 clients), but we will handle this from the Assignment Server "manually" to take care of this until the new client gets out. Once we get over the hump, we should be ok.