How true, how true...

[Quark]

Yet is wasn't the smoothest for the vast majority of Blizzard users Quark.

You seem to be my sticking point is in believing anyone had difficulties. It's not. It's this "vast majority" your spouting and yet have completely and utterly failed to show. I saw about the same amount of people complain about the patch as mentioned how easy it was. Many, many more people said nothing at all. That's your "vast majority"?

While the background downloader wasn't causing the lag issues, something did change in it that made patching to 1.11 the most horrible experience of patching to date (and I've seen all their patch methods from Beta phase 3 on).

Qualifier missing: "for you". You're saying my experience that is was the best patch simply doesn't exist? I must be imagining it.

And the fact that Penny Arcade nailed Blizzard with the last comment, "It doesn't cost us a dime," is the real truth in that comic.

Of course, significantly cheaper is not equal to "doesn't cost a dime". It's an exaggeration to say Blizzard uses no bandwidth of their own to push patches. BitTorrent is notoriously awful without enough seeders, and people are pretty quick about making sure they don't become a seeder by closing their connection once their download is complete. The last 10% or so in particular is always a sticking point.

All other MMORPGs out there do a single massive server download, usually hosted by the server the person is playing on so as to spread out the traffic and reduce general latency for all users. Blizzard is the only MMORPG runner that uses a busted version of BitTorrent to download the patches. With the other MMORPGs I've played, Blizzard wins in the game play department, but in the patching department, they come in dead last.

Here's one area where I partially agree with you. But isn't Stormrage in bad enough shape without people leeching bandwidth to download a patch? Besides the fact that what works for many other MMORPGs may be complete failures for WoW. Having bandwidth available that you only utilize at most once a month is much easier for a company to stomach when it's 1/10th the bandwidth required.