What James said. This entire matter with the EU anti-trust case made me lol. It's not like Microsoft put an intentional loopback preventing FireFox.Com from being loaded. Amirite?

You had to go and remind me that Alltel got bought out by Verizon and my international texting goes from $0 per international text to $0.20 per international text when my contract ends >.> I guess now is my chance to get used to skype mobile xD

That comment about staying away from Windows 7 till the bugs get ironed out is ignorant and un-knowledgeable to say the least. You as a company close to Engadget should learn to be more informed. Windows 7 is an incremental upgrade, which means it's closely related to Vista with majority of the upgrades being quirks that were deemed unnecessary for Vista but good for another OS, including UI changes, x64 improvements and many other improvements. It has MORE work then Vista does because it was originally planned to be THEE successor to XP. So here it is in short: Blizzard games DO work on Windows 7 with NO problems, there are some minor improvements to game quality under Windows 7 in x64 as well as it working in x64 as x86 from a public folder. Actually, most software works, unless it happens to be security software and rightfully they should need to adjust their drivers and kernel locks for the new Windows. One of the biggest improvements to Windows 7 is the x64 support and overall performance in x64 vs. x86, you can feel the power under x64 now.

I moved to Thrall months ago - I mean months ago back when my toon only had like 50 days play-time - because it was such a great raiding server, never had a bad time in a pug. Let alone a bad time finding a good raiding guild. I'm sad to have to go but it seems all the crap players that got weened out are coming back. No offense if you like to wipe raids or nothing, you always give me a good laugh, I've packed my stuff and moved.

YAY, more need rolls for me

YAY, show the love! xD

You obviously have no idea how this industry works let alone software programming.

1.) For a spelling mistake, which is one of the first places they would have looked, they could grep every line of code for common spelling mistakes.

2.) For every line they update, they acknowledge it in developer notes for the latest release, these are kind of like release notes but instead they tell the latest developer changes. So going back and finding out what happened shouldn't be this hard.

3.) Testing testing testing, this company has MONEY out the butt, they have the ability to private test amongst developers for issues and roll out developer servers further testing software BEFORE release.

You are trying to make up excuses for incompetence, ignorance, and laziness of testing and debug checks. The common person has no discretion between either as they are a paying customer and they expect a certain level of service as well as a certain level of quality service. I am not saying Blizzard doesn't provide this as it's your job to decide this.

Here is what I see:

1.) Programmer programs
2.) Programmer tests it, obviously is a newbie programmer and doesn't pay much attention to every detail. Isn't as attentive as he should be because all he can think about is the release of WOTLK and the patch they need to release for WOTLK fixing all it's bugs.
3.) Senior programmer looks over changes, obviously doesn't know much more then the programmer, approves the code block and then it gets finalised.
4.) We get the typical excuse "ooops fat finger cauzed ur downtime", we lose game-time (during the time when most people game,) get no reimbursement, get told to suck it up.

Wait, what?

As far as somebody saying Wintergrasp would cause it's own problem, they thought of that on the Beta, I believe it's segregated into it's own server on the cluster that makes up a realm. It would feasable help eleminate that issue but not rid of it completly in some circumstances. Or they could have just simply expanded the cluster into a secondary cluster for Northrend to help eliminate this issue in Wintergrasp. AKA your normal cluster (the realms zones) and then a cluster in the cluster for Northrend.

On the subject of packets causing hardware damage, welcome to our industry, it happens. You don't get into this industry and introduce controls. You expect uncontrolled, over-capacity situations. Thus the fact they roll in a Tier 3 data centre. Even if they damaged a router they went straight to another and it was replaced, and for under $500. I'm sure ATT, like us, have hardware agreements to get hardware cheaper then you could ever imagine. You can expect Blizzard pays a minimum of $5000 per cluster (this is an extreme under-cut most likely) that being said, replacing a server or router still doesn't cut profits any. They charge so much for a server because of the fact they can't control over-capacity situations, nor do they want to. The chances of them actually damaging a server is low anyways, it would take almost 20-30x the load that server was designed for to kill it and constantly, for some time. We've had servers top out at 20x load for close to 5+ hours and never damage them and if they get damaged, we use a Cluster System just like they do so we take down that server and replace it and nobody ever knows. Well, their cluster system is a bit different then a redundancy it's more like a load-system. So you'll notice them taking it down, but it wouldn't be too long because ATT can switch out that server and restore it in under an hour or two.

What you saw was Blizzard doing their "we wanna be administrators and engineers!" call-out. That or they were trying to make sure your raid was for sure over and that the servers returned to normal capacity as well as normal latency quickly rather then 5 minutes later by causing a down-boot of the cluster forcing you off the server. Basically damage control so that 20*1000 posts didn't hit the forums, 20*1000 complaints didn't hit and 20*100 tickets weren't opened.

Did you just seriously call somebody a 'tard' in the same sentence you misspelled "you're"? Irony is legendary.