Originally posted by Nostromo21

GW never set out to create a marriage between casual & hc players - no idea where you got this from. It was always meant to appeal to casual gamers first & foremost & keep them coming back in cycles (kinda like CoX does imo). Don't confuse the PvE & PvP games as anything relating to each other - they're completely separate games. A dedicated PvP player can buy a whole skill/item unlock pack & never step foot in the PvE realms, which suits me just fine thank you very much.

Originally posted by ShiloFields

 

Originally posted by jaix
would be nice to see where that 30 million (rounded up) per month from just the Americas goes. probably part of my issue with Blizzard. with the profits they make, i expect this game to have groundbreaking features added constantly. instead i see token additions and an expansion that has taken long enough for them to develop an entirely new game. i guess congratulations are still in order. they've mastered the ultimate form of capitalism: maximum continual profit with minimum maintenance expenditure.

WoW's appeal is based on its bland perfection, not lots of features.  Lots of features make the game hard to balance and polish, technically more demanding, both server side and importantly client side, and more difficult to learn.  They decided to try to keep the game simple and its worked.

For example, the game doesn't have player housing, not even instanced housing.  Personally, I consider that feature essential to being a complete or full MMORPG.  But it has drawback,  the client has to load those features everytime it passes by or all of your items furniture when you walk in.  This is difficult for older / slower systems to do.  Just ask anyone that tried to play SWG back in the day with less than a gig of ram.  (when a gig was quite a bit). 

Another feature I consider necessary to be a true MMORPG is extensive customization.  Customization is another area WoW gets an F on.  But its intentional.  If each human could be a different size shape etc. that's more database information to store and hard for each client to each time you pass a character.  If you have a slow as dirt computer your glad old Sticky the Orc is the exact same proportions that every other one them.

WoW doesn't have many features, but what little it does, it does very well.

To give a food analogy, WoW is like the perfect soda cracker.  Full featured MMORPGs are like any delicousm, persishable, and exocitc food.

I can't help but agree with your assessment (coffee you had a valid point as well). as i said, it's an issue that I myself have with them. I just feel that what they provide in diverse content isn't directly proportional to community support (read "revenue").