Quick explanation as to why all this is happening:
Its not for the lack of hardware, its their shitty server code. They're using AWS and constantly renting more servers (the channels you see) to mitigate the problem, but it doesn't actually solve it.
If you play enough you'll notice that each channel has at least 2 services supporting them - one for movement and combat, another for items and npc interactions. There's probably more, like chat and such, but those are likely unimportant.
The first is relatively stable and typically only gets bogged down when there's a shitload of people in the same channel.
The second tends to slow down over time, presumably because they're recording (and probably indexing) all the transactions that take place on a map, and it takes more and more time to add new records as people keep picking up items and talking to npcs.
You'll notice that sometimes it can take up to 30 seconds to register you picking up something, but you can continue to move around and combat without a problem. However, when the item/npc interaction service goes completely to shit (see: 5 minutes to interact with an npc), your combat will also start suffering because they're probably running on the same server instance which now has a gigantic backlog of interactions to settle. This renders all the channels running on that particular server completely fucked, which isn't a problem because you can swap channels until you find one that isn't.
The problem occurs when too many fucked channels are accumulated and renting more servers don't help because they get flooded and fucked within minutes by people trying to escape the lag. This is when IMC shuts things down for 'emergency maintenance' aka 'wipe the records clean so it takes take a whole fucking minute to register someone picking up loot'.
Right now with the current population we're having servers shut down at least twice, sometimes 3 times a week. This is borderline unacceptable. Imagine a flood of new players that doubled our population; we'd be shutting down every day and eventually no one will play.
This is why we have the restriction in place. They're likely rushing to fix their shitty services right now so they can lift the restrictions.
On a side note: I cannot imagine they this was not caught during the beta and fixed before an official release. In fact, I cannot imagine why they released without the ability to buy their in-game currency. They've got some serious lack of capable leadership over there, that's for sure.
