Interesting post from WoW general forum.

[savaughn]

You go to explain how bugs/problems are introduced when you make changes to a system, in response to a quote which contained "assuming no core system changes are needed."
Irrelevant. What is being discussed is whether or not these servers can eventually operate smoothly with little need for babysitting. That has absolutely nothing to do with how complex the system is. How complex the system is relates to how long it takes and how hard it is to make it smooth, not to the possibility.

Of course natural disasters like tornadoes change things, but they'll destroy any system anyway, and are kind of out of scope.

By the way, I'm getting the feeling of an implication that normal servers/PCs aren't complex, which is absurd. Perhaps you might want to learn assembly, or maybe even delve into hardware design.
I was under the impression that these servers ran on silicon chips.
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Congratulations! You win the Snarky Trolling Post of the Thread award! Your large pile of victory tar will be sent out shortly.

You are accurate in that eventually the support costs for a system go down over time. A typical timeline for complex systems of this nature would be 2-4 years of development during which your ability to cope with events is negligible because you have a moving target, followed by another 2-3 years of high end production support where you can actually hammer out as much automation of your support costs as possible. After this period, overall support will be much lower. This, of course, assumes that you never upgrade the software or the hardware. Changing your back end SAN, for example, can very likely drive you straight back into development level support costs.

At the current time, we know for a fact that Blizz is in development mode. The company has made a complete overhaul of the hardware platform and has been making substantial back end changes. Considering the economics of game development, it wouldn't surprise me to find out that they were understaffed on top of that which means they probably are working hard to just keep the systems running right now with little free availability to improve their monitoring systems.

Irrelevant. What is being discussed is whether or not these servers can eventually operate smoothly with little need for babysitting.
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Normally I ignore this kind of redirection, but not with this level of spite in your post. This is complete misdirection. We were not talking about some distant far off eventuality. Someone estimated Blizz's CURRENT COST for support and you chimed in on how that was ludicrous because hardware runs itself and needs no care or maintenance.

I'm pulling my support experience from knowing the support infrastructure of systems that support a company of 80,000 employees and has more than 25 24x7 factories. Where are you pulling your system support cost model from?