Wolfshead

Precisely! Blizzard purposely allows players to level from 1-70 with relative ease and never prepares them for the reality of the "endgame" in WoW. Imagine if from grades 1 to grades 12 you as a student sat around sang songs and finger painted (the "fun" stuff that children do in primary school). Then you graduate and enter college and suddenly realize that all of those years of non-learning failed to prepare you for your ultimate destination: college and then a career.

This is exactly what Blizzard does by creating the the extremely easy, and accessible content from 1-70 (and made even easier in a previous patch). Players new to MMO's are left confused, dumbfounded and perplexed at what to do next. Suddenly social skills and meeting new people become paramount as one has to literally find a guild in order to experience all of the multi-million dollar content that lies ahead.

Why then has Blizzard knowingly created a play experience that fails to adequately train and prepare the player for the content that lies ahead?

One of the tenets of good game design is to ensure that players are always faced with appropriate challenges at or near the margins of their skill level. This is how players learn and get better. Every good game does this. Blizzard does this somewhat adequately with their raid content but fails to do this with the transition from solo to grouping to raiding. WoW from 1-70 should be a boot camp for the ultimate destination of the self-actualization of the players avatar: raiding. Yes, that very same raiding that puts the player right in the middle of all of the major plots and storylines.

We know that Blizzard has intentionally created WoW to be like this. Again at this year's GDC Rob Pardo talked about the '"solo to max level" as one of the cornerstone's of WoW's success. Last year's GDC Pardo talked about the donut theory.

The real reason must be that they are doing it to retain as many subscribers as possible. They get 10 million people hooked on the admittedly fun and easy part of WoW. The character advancement and progression is euphoric. Then it stops but by then, the player can't stop. He must find a way to keep progressing his character. He wants to see Ragnaros. He wants to defeat Illidan. He wants to vanquish Arthas and so on. WoW is the ultimate carrot on a stick.

While WoW is a very successful and popular MMO, it is not a very good MMO because it's spreads itself too thin in an effort to be all things to all people. We see how this kind of philosophy is currently ruining class balance in the drive to balance classes for PVP at the expense of PVE. Yet in process Blizzard's approach ends up pleasing nobody. There is a real lack of cohesion in the various playstyes in WoW currently. One wonders how long the middle can hold.

In answer to the original question. I believe that Blizzard should reset the learning curve for raiding in the upcoming expansion. As far as I'm concerned MMO company's are treading dangerously close to the precipe of creating content that is far too complex and heavily scripted for the average person out there to complete successfully, let alone enjoy and have fun doing it. Future growth in MMO's will demand that we accept more people into the ranks of MMO players from the periphery of society. The next WoW could very well have 50 million people worldwide. That will put pressure on content designers to create scripted encounters that satifies the lowest common denominator player out there. Which in turn supports my point made above, that challenge and difficulty levels should be ramped up to prepare players for the endgame.