Version 3 was hugely delayed, hugely overbudget, and...well...utter, utter crap. The UI was worse, many features were lost, performance was bad, stability was terrible; there was literally no advantage over version 2.
From the players' side, v3 was just much, much, much worse than v2. But I'm pretty sure WotC realized that. I've heard, though I can't personally attest, that the reason they stuck with v3 was that v2 ran on a single server, and they didn't know how to fix it.
I'm not sure if the entire thing was literally a single server, but there was clearly some immense scaling issues with the Leaping Lizard/v2 codebase.
One of the many huge problems with v3, however, is that they opted to combine a complete rewrite of the server with a complete rewrite of the client AND a complete UI overhaul.
I don't know what the wire protocol for v2 looked like (probably crap; everything else was), but I struggle to imagine a scenario where they couldn't have rewritten the server code to allow scalability without needing to touch the client, or at least with minimal changes. (And let's not forget that v3 scaled like crap too, at least at first.)
Mind you, Wizard's wouldn't be the first (or the thousandth) team to inherit a crappy code base, throw up their hands, announce that they simply couldn't possibly salvage it, and ask for permission to rewrite it from scratch. It's just most successful places learn to say "absolutely not" well before they're operating at the scale Wizards is. (Or they fail miserably and go under.) I think what makes MTGO so fascinating is that's it's one of the worst software development disasters I've ever seen, and yet it's still a success...of sorts.
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From the players' side, v3 was just much, much, much worse than v2. But I'm pretty sure WotC realized that. I've heard, though I can't personally attest, that the reason they stuck with v3 was that v2 ran on a single server, and they didn't know how to fix it.
I'm not sure if the entire thing was literally a single server, but there was clearly some immense scaling issues with the Leaping Lizard/v2 codebase.
One of the many huge problems with v3, however, is that they opted to combine a complete rewrite of the server with a complete rewrite of the client AND a complete UI overhaul.
I don't know what the wire protocol for v2 looked like (probably crap; everything else was), but I struggle to imagine a scenario where they couldn't have rewritten the server code to allow scalability without needing to touch the client, or at least with minimal changes. (And let's not forget that v3 scaled like crap too, at least at first.)
Mind you, Wizard's wouldn't be the first (or the thousandth) team to inherit a crappy code base, throw up their hands, announce that they simply couldn't possibly salvage it, and ask for permission to rewrite it from scratch. It's just most successful places learn to say "absolutely not" well before they're operating at the scale Wizards is. (Or they fail miserably and go under.) I think what makes MTGO so fascinating is that's it's one of the worst software development disasters I've ever seen, and yet it's still a success...of sorts.
It's a success because of IP protection for Magic. Nobody else is allowed to make their own version of MTGO.