Of course they did. The server has perhaps 1/5 of the content needed to keep everyone happy (it was 1/10 in Kunark). The staff could have made any number of changes: reducing the spawn time of raid mobs or giving tokens to do spawn them (sure, it's not classic, but neither is variance), improving the method of competition (simultaneous repops, maybe temporarily making zones PVP, /guildwar, etc), forcing a rotation, or even doing nothing. Most Classic mobs have no variance, so the players eventually would have worked out a rotation after the 50th Trakanon desynch with 500 players in the zone.
Instead they implemented variance, which gives raid targets to whoever is willing to sit there staring at the screen the longest and form massive multinational zergs to kill raid targets 24/7. The huge artificial timesinks of variance and dubious petitionquest directly poisoned the raid scene until everyone hates everyone else over that one time they kited/trained/otherwise broke some rule, probably intentionally because they figured people wouldn't be frapsing (plus it drives out the 'normal' people who just want to play the game).
This mess is 100% the staff's fault. The players are simply reacting to the situation they have created. If I had control over the situation I could clean things up within a month, easily.
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