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Behind the Scenes At Sony's NOC
VonGuard writes "Earlier this year, I spoke to Mark Rizzo, the man who manages the people who run Sony's online game servers. Rizzo learned the ropes of MMO hosting back on Ultima Online, and we chatted about where the tough problems were then versus now. Rizzo compares the operation to a 24/7 scientific simulation, albeit with some sassier and more involved end-users. His favorite innovation since those early days? Rapidly provisioning and deploying Linux installations tailor-made to their purposes. Here's my article on Rizzo and his band of 50-some-odd sysadmin-cum-dungeon-masters, written for the new newspaper The Systems Management News."
All the problems you are describing are engineering/development issues and don't have anything to do with operations. The architects would be for the infrastructure, deployment, monitoring, etc etc, not for the games themselves.
The client and what the server does and has to do are entirely separate things and pretty much have no relation with regards to each other in any way except that they communicate data back and forth for one or the other to process.