Yes good job. I was kinda excited to see the bard class announcement. Then I remembers it was April 1st. The bard class in eq was supper fun!

That's EQ for yah, making bards cooks instead of musicians.

The "fluff" could also be seen as Blizzards polish... what separates them from the competition.

Any company knows that that spending time on PR and money on advertising is important to growth. They'd be silly not to have people on there payroll who were doing things to get the company noticed.

Sure I and probably you would like them to spend every penny on game development, but the truth is without the fluff they wouldn't open themselves up to the general populous and ultimately not have as larger market share as they do... thus meaning less money for game development in the long run.

This may surprise you to find out, but giving the server developers more money will not turn them into computer gods that can solve any problem with a snap of their fingers.
Time is always a factor when working with computer systems, and I do not see any practical way to bring that factor anywhere close to zero.

But... money fixes everything! Right? Right?

What exactly are you arguing here? That there's a team of people who spend all year an April Fool's that should be laid off, and the savings in firing this team could go to more programmers, since doubling the programming team would make WotLK come out twice as fast, or make the servers more stable? There's so many problems here I'm not sure where to begin. First off, the people doing the April Fool's material are almost certainly creative types who contribute to WoW in other very useful ways (cinematics and the website, for instance) but had a few cycles to burn on something to amuse and entertain their users (which, when you think about it, is Blizzard's job, and the key to their success). Secondly, cutting their budget and adding more to the technical side isn't likely to make the servers come up any faster - too many cooks spoil the broth, nine women combined can't make a baby in one month, and more programmers does not necessarily make a given programming task happen faster.

Money equates to time. The more money you have to throw at a problem the faster it gets fixed and the better it will run. If I were the IT admin at Blizzard I would run beefy vmware cluster for all the servers. Down time would be about 10 minutes.
They have the cash so why not?

I read in an interview with Blizzard that they don't outsource anything (currently) I'll try and find the link.

The official forums estimate that there are in excess for 2500 Blizz. employees worldwide... only a handful of them actually involved in the PR, advertising, web development etc.

Just take a look at there job board... as Adam says most of the hires they are looking for are technical/specialist skilled folks, for IT, database and artwork.

@Adam Holisky

I am not sure what version of Vmware your talking about. The VMware clusters I run scale very well in my dynamic and complex environment. Our database has 1000s of concurrent connections with pretty heavy hitting database requests and the vmware cluster has 0 problems handling it. We run 3 VMware servers accessing a high speed LUN on a beefy emc SAN. I can literally shutdown a server in the middle of the day for maintenance and everyone still gets access to their database data.

I would doubt that their databases are anything "cutting edge". In fact databases are pretty legacy architecture considering most corporate networks only used to be big iron IBM databases.

I had someone like yourself apply for a job in our team (corporate application development and database administration). Thought they knew everything and had a 'quick fix' answer for every single problem which was whatever their pet favorite system was.

Thing was, like all people who claim to know everything, they had no idea of how to cope with a system that did things that were even slightly away from the normal standard.

Blizzard have a reputation for producing very high quality games with a richness of lore and humour. You do not get that by grinding out corporate monkeys and firing anyone who dares deviate from the company line. They produce innovative software that I daresay would not respond well to some 'put it all on this standard platform and abide by the rules' terminology.

So with all due respect to the people who reckon they could run Blizzards servers better and that they have all the answers? You talk very pretty but I doubt you could pull it off.

Naix:

From my experience VMWare clusters are perfect for some applications but have severe performance limitations in the area of I/O. I suspect downtime is related to database upsize issues - where new features of course require different database schemas - the database has to then be upgraded. When I did consulting for a company who delt with this stuff - usually that went well, but when it didn't, you were there all night.

I think considering their existing release cycles Blizzard actually does quite well.

Anyhow it was already stated that the community development people work on april fools events - and I think its what makes Blizzard unique. I wouldn't play their game if they weren't honest, forthright, and fun.

Trust me - what they do is way better that what Sony did with EQ. Imagine patches that came out where they would drastically change the stats on a weapon or something else equally as huge and never tell anyone.

Are you honestly telling Blizzard how to spend their money? .. Does your employer/the government tell you how to spend yours?

I don't claim to know everything or even have all the answers. When it comes to IT I know what works and what limitations can be over come in a large corporate network. Upgrading to a Vmware cluster is no quick fix by any stretch. An upgrade of this magnitude would take a few weeks to accomplish, but I am sure Blizzard could handle it. It would be well worth it.

Being an IT administrator you can never be satisfied how a network is run. It will change one day, and you must be ready for that change by trying new systems out. I am contently looking for improvement to network I have in place. Vmware is not my "pet system" and to deny vmware really taking over is like denying windows ever making it into the server room.

How does Blizzard servers differ from ANY servers? I seriously doubt it would not be that hard to manage/migrate.