Interesting post from WoW general forum.

[Darian]

You're quite right about that. However with good coding techniques you can keep this to a minimum[right][snapback]71184[/snapback][/right]

You'd be amazed (well, maybe not) how many developers who have great ideas and write important code don't practice good coding techniques.

Also, I'd expect that at some point, content updates in WOW will be mostly data and little code. New instances, monsters, spells, etc may require code sometimes, but probably not as often.

Actually... until I recently changed departments to work on something else after five torturous years, I admined the servers and processes which drive my company's business infrastructure (read: heavily dependent on frequently-changing business rules). Even with core code in place which allows those business rules to be changed without any actual code changes (reloads from DB), mere data changes have on occasion caused the servers to melt down, because the rules were written badly. I would go so far as to say it's not just possible, but extremely likely, that something as innocuous as an item/content update can and will wreck a WoW server at some point.

GIGO, after all.