Blizzard does not cater to their audience they cater to what can and will bring them back subscriptions. Do you know how many people are upset that they are bringing Pandaren into the game? Do you know how many people are pissed they keep catering to the casuals who just want free loot? Blizzard caters to what can bring them the most subs and the most money. Sorry but if you are talking about a negative association of EA than Blizzard is in no beter boat with the IP bastardizing Activision. Activision has removed EA from the top of the hate category, because all they do is **** all IPs they come out with until nothing else can be milked from them than ditch them. While EA does this with their sports titles Activision is doing it with all their series. The audience has "spoken" on the forums? You do realize that a small percentage of players post on the forums correct? There is a flaw in people will return to what they know and like and reject the new endeavor. While this is true there is also a time investment aspect to it. You put in 6-7 years with a character or a game it's going to be hard to just give up anyway. Not to mention even with some bugs in the game people will still play they can look over the bugs laugh about them and still have fun, don't believe me go ask Bethesda how they do it every game they release. If you advised people to divest anything with EA and Bioware off of 1 game than I think you should go back to school. Big reason is Bioware is NOT one of those companies that can/will release a bad game than just close it's doors like less successful or big named companies. Even if the game fell flat on it's face both companies will still be ok while they may shed some talent they will both be ok. And considering the gaming industry growth is expected to and has done nothing but rise your clients would be idiots to do so. You realize that even the beloved WoW was released with 0 Battlegrounds and has grown since than? When you reach the cap level at anything they ALL become grinds for Gear, Rep, ect. I agree with the non fluid ability but I believe that can and will be worked out. I do agree with no auto attack it's hard to be social when you can't stop hitting buttons for a second to talk to your guild, party, friends, ect. Faction imbalance isn't as much of a problem as people begin to try other classes and combo's. I don't mind the non tired battlegrounds however I wish there was some sort of MMR in the game that would balance it a little better. The community is what the community makes of it. There are plenty of other sites with server forums up and such but even look at the Warcraft forums only a majority of the Guilds/Players post there, most of them have their own guild/clan pages and they communicate through there. Now let's talk about Customer support at least with the Auto Droid response. You realize that even on WoW (since this is what you're making most of your comparisons to) after every major content patch/expansion their usual response time is a week if not more and you usually get your response in an email or ingame mail. Lack of metrics and logs I'm okay with for now because I don't want to be pushed into the cookie cutter classes that plague every MMO out there. Abilities are pretty straight forward as long as you read your tooltips so I'm not sure if that's what you actually meant by that. And I hope they do not allow addons and such that plague other games and leave people open to account hacking and such. Visibility on the future if pretty straight forward you just have to know where to look and right now why would they discuss anything other than patching up the problems that have arose from the launch? Cause then you'd have your customer base complaining they are looking forward to other things other than the problems they have at the moment? And they explained this in the dev tracker at least for the magenta crystal. The problem is people are too lazy to actually look it up. Why should they come out right and tell people where to find them? Not to mention if you go to other sites (You know like people go to wowhead when looking for stuff) you can find the information you need. It just takes a few seconds of looking it's not the developers fault their base is lazy. End game Ops bugged, Heroic FP's (some encounters) overturned for 2 weeks now - this is unacceptable, sorry. These are the initial OPS, not newly implemented expansions or patches. No excuse. I could go on about the negative niche and non universal things, but that becomes somewhat ideological in essence. The point here is that, this game has potential that is being squandered daily, and people are responding by leaving the game. Most will not return, and this is proven by 10 years of MMO's failing and the habitual patterns of the market / MMO audience, which is about 24-28 million world over. In closing you can call yourself a Goldman Sachs Analyst or not but you are coming at this post more as a consumer of the current game than an Analyst. I personally don't give a damn where you work but when you construe what you constitue as an "investor analyst" vs a consumer analyst then you're whole title is just thrown out. You realize that most of WoW's old dev team is in 2 spots. Working on Titan and they left for Trion while some still work for the WoW team. OH and as an Investment analyst look at the track record for taking a game offline and trying to relaunch it and tell me that is the way to go. Every game that has been taken down and relaunched has failed with the exception of APB which when they relaunched they had 3 million new users but even then the game is still lack luster.