Battlefield 2 uses Python too (look around in the game's directories, you'll find lots of *.py files). In fact, I'd guess that it's the most widely played game right now that uses Python. What's interesting to me is that they were able to utilize Python and still develop a state-of-the-art, performant 3-D FPS. (People with slightly older computers might argue about "performant", but it does actually run very well even with the Pythion compiler/interperter baked in.)
While I think Blizzard is handling these growth problems more responsibly than most, I wonder if they'd have been better off rolling the game out more slowly? In other words, they should never have made more copies of WoW available than they were sure they could handle. They could have started with 100K copies available, made sure that worked ok, then rolled out 250K more copies, and gradually ramp up. (Of course, they did release WoW shortly before Xmas, and I'm sure they wanted to sell as many copies as possible over the holidays...)
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Battlefield 2 uses Python too (look around in the game's directories, you'll find lots of *.py files). In fact, I'd guess that it's the most widely played game right now that uses Python.
What's interesting to me is that they were able to utilize Python and still develop a state-of-the-art, performant 3-D FPS. (People with slightly older computers might argue about "performant", but it does actually run very well even with the Pythion compiler/interperter baked in.)
"GMail requires space to be dedicated to each new person."
Really? Do you really think they set aside 1GB of space for every user that signs up?
There's no way IE7 will be written in .NET, they don't have time to completely rewrite IE from scratch (not if they expect to release a beta version this summer).
And remember what happened to Netscape when they decided to do a rewrite.
While I think Blizzard is handling these growth problems more responsibly than most, I wonder if they'd have been better off rolling the game out more slowly?
In other words, they should never have made more copies of WoW available than they were sure they could handle.
They could have started with 100K copies available, made sure that worked ok, then rolled out 250K more copies, and gradually ramp up.
(Of course, they did release WoW shortly before Xmas, and I'm sure they wanted to sell as many copies as possible over the holidays...)