Spare me, please. It does nothing for me that you claim to dwarf Blizzard in terms of how to establish a server infrastructure. Your comments about Blizzard being stupid simply tells me you haven't got the slightest clue how hard it must be to establish a working infrastructure for a totally unprecedented amount of players.
http://news.cnet.com/World-of-Warcraft-battles-server-problems/2100-1043_3-6063990.html
Here's a nice article, written a little over a year after WoW was released, that describes a few of their problems. It also explains why WoW managed to keep their fanbase despite all their problems.
Most issues mentioned are network related, but there's a fairly easy way to see if an issue is related to network/infrastructure or simply the server: Are other people in the same cluster having the same problems? If you ever see 5+ servers go down at the same time, it's a network issue related to a certain data center. If it's just your own server, it's related to the server. That particular sign is a bit rough, but it generally gives a good indication.
You won't find the most competent game developers in the gaming industry?
I think you're wrong.
Based on what? I base my statement on the fact that I travel the world going to technological conventions and have the luxury/honor of working with such brilliant people on a day to day basis. I also have friends working in the gaming industry, and know roughly what expect.
I'd say I have a fairly good idea of how the world of technology looks. I'm sure Blizzard, with as much money as they have, can hire top class developers, but they're still not going to be very best; the ones who truly push the boundaries of development. Like I said, those guys work with projects significantly larger and/or more challenging/complex than anything Blizzard can offer them.
If you're looking for the top developers in the world, the best places to look would probably be the worlds biggest banks, NASA, various scientific/technological institutions or the military. Such places have extreme demands in terms of performance and network stability.
Remember, we're not talking about the best developers at optimizing C++ code in a graphics engine. We're talking about the best developers and systems architects, that are capable of building the most solid networks (you mentioned the "best developers" when discussing making a mistake regarding networks).
Blizzard had practically no prior experience at building such networks at all, so I really have no idea why you would ever think they were the best at it. How on earth would they know more about building solid networks than the ones who built the banking networks that practically run the world, with billions (trillions?) of daily transactions? It's not even remotely the same job as game development, and has nothing at all to do with that particular job. It's as different as a carpenter compared to a taxi driver, with completely different educations. My guess is, Blizzard had to hire such architects/developers before launching WoW, because I honestly doubt they even employed that kind of people prior to WoW (why would they, when making single player games? BNet is hardly reason enough to have a bunch of systems architects sitting around).
That's the only challenging thing about any raid. Once you learn the simplistic puzzles, it's really all about group coordination.
It's the way raids work - and little has changed apart from the amount of people participating and the amount of hoops Blizzard want people to jump through in their approach to boss encounters.
Well, yes, that's true. However, the puzzles and mechanics in MC are so simple, it's basically all about getting a half decent raid together, as anyone can understand the simple mechanics without a lot of practice (obviously, the team work still needs some practice, but most positions are fairly stationary in MC, so even that doesn't require a whole lot). These simple puzzles have evolved a whole lot since then, and now require significantly more skill and effort from every single raider. Also, the raids are tuned to the point where a single mistake will wipe the raid, whereas in MC, someone dying was rarely the end of the fight.
Raids in general have come a long way since then - the most challenging encounter so far (that's not impossible, like Cthun was before they fixed him) is either M'uru or in Sunwell, or the hardest version of Yogg-Saron in Ulduar (an Achievement called Alone in the Dark). Especially the latter is so extreme, even the best guilds in the world spent several months completing that fight alone. We're talking about the same guilds that, with 40 people, spent less time clearing all of Naxxramas than Yogg-Saron. These people have had years to perfect their teamplay and coordination, so when they spend three months killing a single boss, you know it's far more than just getting the group coordination to work.
It's hard to explain why such encounters are so much more difficult than it used to be, but it boils down to a few things:
- Far more abilities to counter. Instead of 2-4 abilities, tough bosses have 10-15.
- More random factors involved. In MC, most abilities were used with X time between them, making them very predictable. Especially since there were so few abilities.
- More finely tuned. In MC, as you said, the raid didn't need max DPS/HPS from everyone. In tough encounters, every single DPSer must be able to push to the max of what their class is capable of in almost perfect gear (and obviously have close to perfect gear/spec). Otherwise, you'll hit the enrage timer, and the boss instantly wipes you. M'uru in Sunwell is an example of a fight that is redicilously fine tuned, where a single second will keep you wiping for 50+ tries, because you lack that tiny bit of optimization from one of your players.
The challenge was there regardless - and your claim that 20 top raiders could carry 20 crap players is completely wrong. A couple of morons, and the entire raid would wipe again and again - and I know, because we had our share.
Our raids carried quite a few players through MC. You said yourself that you were top DPS. Imagine if most of the raid was as good as you, would it really matter if a few of the bad DPSers were dead? You'd still have more than enough damage to kill the boss. If you raided up to BT, you've cleared places like SSC and TK, so how can you even say that MC was challenging? Fights like Lady Vashj, Kael'thas and pre-nerf Gruul/Magtheridon are lightyears ahead of MC in terms of challenge (due to the reasons listed above, though they weren't as finely tuned as the encounters mentioned). All those bosses took several weeks, if not months, even for experienced raiding guilds to kill. I spent more time on pre-nerf Magtheridon than most of MC combined, and we had a server first kill, so the rest were even slower.
Like I said, Ragnaros and Onyxia were decent. The rest were just plain bad, probably for a reason - they were entry level raid encounters, which means any guild with experience in other MMOs would naturally find them fairly easy.