Is Blizz the root of all evil?

[Darian]

This is the standard response that really concerns me.  It means that we as consumers should and expect a crappy experience because that is the NORM.  It is the standard in the industry.  Honestly, is this what people really want?  Isn't the point of Beta testing to iron out all these "crappy technology" problems.  Isn't Beta there to polish a game so that its playable and enjoyable to the consumer?  The current state of MMO's is exactly as described.  But in any other field of service, Blizzard, SOE etc. would have been out of business a long time ago.  Why is this acceptable?  I don't have the answer for that other than as long as consumers are willing to shell out the bucks for "crappy" launches this will continue.
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No, it doesn't mean that we as consumers should expect a crappy experience because it's the norm; it means that we as consumers of a relatively new technology should expect a crappy experience because the architectures and designs haven't been perfected yet and expecting them to suddenly be perfected isn't rational.

Further, we're dealing with leaps of technology within the genre which make solving the problems we see repeatedly even harder to combat. With EQ, you had a server architecture wherein there were dozens of zones which were basically separate entities; if there were 140 people in Western Commonlands, well, that had relatively little impact on the performance for a player who was hunting in Kithicor. The introduction of seamless zoning in and of itself sets back the effort to stabilize server architecture. To top it off, regardless of who Company G consults with, they still have to write their own code. Blizzard isn't using Sony's code, or Mythic's code, or EA's code, or NCSoft's code. What came before is nigh-irrelevant, because when it comes to the code, they started from scratch.

In any other field of service... well, you're not correct here. It's been about 8 years since the introduction of the graphic MMO. A full decade after the introduction of graphical dial-up online services, downtime on those services was higher than the normal downtime for a moden-day MMO. A full decade after AOL started letting people get together in chatrooms that only held 23 people, there were still noticeable lag spikes in chat. Hell, it's been over 25 years since the introduction of the home computer, and it took 20 years for a home-computer software company to release an operating system that wasn't arguably buggier than its predecessor!

A decade after the introduction of the automobile, it was still possible your car spent more time in the shop than on the road. A decade after the introduction of television, they were still black and white and had fuzzy pictures. People do still seem to die on the operating table, in situations where no malpractice has occurred, despite decades of modern surgical techniques. I'm pretty sure that's more important than a game not being all you expected it to be, isn't it?

Perfecting something takes time, and arguing that because a few other people made incremental improvements the next company should be able to perform flawlessly is an unrealistic argument.

Why is it acceptable? Here, we've got an MMO with the most daring attempt at seamless integration we've seen so far, and with the largest user base ever. It got rushed into production by the publisher, against the better judgement of the development team; that's regrettable. But that fact is also why I'm being patient with the developers and expecting them to get it fixed. It's not so much that it's "acceptable" as it is something I'm willing to put up with, especially when I consider the dollar-per-hour entertainment value. It costs me more to go see a movie that I pay for an entire month of this game, after all.