Mandatory five-minute delay to relog?

I had to relog in order to stop an animation that was playing when I teleported. (Known issue there I think.) Anyway, I got a message when I tried to log back in: "The system is logging you out right now. Your Account will not be available until 2006-04-15 23:45:00 Pacific Time."

Why is it necessary for me to wait five minutes to log back in? Ordinarily I relog to fix minor issues like this and it's not a problem. Now, five minutes isn't going to kill me, but it's a bit of a hassle when you're in the middle of talking to someone and you say, "be right back," and then a mesage like this shows up.

Gesh i was on a 45 wait until the system logged me out. It kept giving me 5 min wait periods.

I've gotten this in the last week or so a few times, usually when logging out and relogging.

Most times it's said 5 minutes, but I've gotten back on in 3-4.

Still... it feels like the WoW Queue times all over again.

its a pain in the rabbit tail when they pop up over and over again.

Now it wants me to wait ten minutes. Client crashed. What's going to take ten minutes I wonder?

How do you keep the login server from getting hammered because it isn't powerful enough to handle the load? You implement a simple-minded "source quench" mechanism that assumes that no matter what the current load is, it might be better in five minutes. If it isn't better in five minutes (even if it could handle it at the 4 minute mark) make the login wait another five minutes.

This is a hack and one that does serve the purpose of keeping the login server from overloading, but it was implemented in a rather ham-fisted way. Five minutes is a really long period where load could have gone from "way too much" to "none" and you'd never be able to take advantage of the open window when load dropped because you were waiting on that artifical hold-down.