World of Warcraft design trends

We would all like to know how World of Warcraft will develop in the future, but of course "knowing" that is impossible. What we can do is to have a look at how WoW is designed and how it developed with the first expansion, the patches, and what is announced for the second expansion. From that we can try to make out trends that could possibly predict where WoW is heading, but we'll have to do like financial analysts and attach a big "past performance is no guarantee of future results" disclaimer to it. So I inserted my WoW disc into my crystal ball and give you my predictions, sorted into a "bad" and a "good" category:

The Bad

• A too strong focus on a part of the game that is accessible to only a too small percentage of the players, raiding. Note that I am not saying that raiding itself is bad, I'm not supporting Cameron's suggestion to turn it into 5-man content. Raiding is a fun activity and a valuable addition to the game. The bad trend is the design that reserves all of raiding for a small elite of hardcore players, and then spending too many resources on that. This could easily be overcome by introducing some form of "easy mode" raiding, in which even a pickup raid could succeed, while keeping the current difficulty for "heroic mode" raids. But apart from some interview bylines that they would love raiding to be more accessible, there is no indication that WoW is heading that way.
  
  
• Players spend too much time in the end game. This is actually a combination of two things: fast leveling and slow releases of expansions. As a result the average player reaches the next level cap in less than half the time before the next expansion, and ends up being stuck in the end game with its much slower character progression for a far too long time. People who feel their characters aren't developing any more tend to quit the game. Which is bad, even if most of them come back for the next expansion. While it is obviously hard to produce expansions faster while keeping the quality level intact, World of Warcraft should at the very least reduce the time between expansions to 12 months, preferably less. This would be better both for the gameplay, and for the business, as every expansion is a guaranteed money printing machine for Blizzard.
  
  
• Game growing fastest in the length dimension. Every expansion seems to add 10 levels to the game. But there hasn't been a new class added to the game in the past 3 years, and the next expansion only promises one single new "hero class". Most new content is added at the top end. This means that the leveling experience for new players, and the replayability for veterans of WoW isn't ideal. Level demographics lead to people mostly soloing all the way up to the level cap. While the ability to solo is a strength of WoW, being forced to solo in a massively multiplayer game because you can't find enough people of your level to form a group is a problem. One possible solution would be cross-server instances, but it is clear that WoW can't increase its level cap indefinitely without negative effects. A better strategy would be a "Kunark" type of expansion, adding new classes and races to encourage people to start over with new characters. One hero class per expansion isn't enough.
  
  
• Lack of social engineering. After 3 years of experimenting with various designs, World of Warcraft still doesn't even have a looking for group functionality that is accepted by the players. The guild functionality is basic, and there are no common purposes and goals provided for a guild to pursue beyond raiding. That encourages guild hopping into whatever guild fits best to your current raid progress, and weakens social cohesion. People should be rewarded for staying loyal to a guild and for working together towards common goals, which would strengthen the social aspects of the game.
  
  
• Lack of innovation. If I write a parody about a fictionary expansion to WoW and end up getting congratulations of how well I predicted the Wrath of the Lich King, something is wrong. World of Warcraft hasn't introduced enough new game elements, and people are waiting for features and innovations like player housing. Blizzard is strong in "exploiting" (their words) and improving upon what they have, but bad at introducing new things.
  

The Good

• Quality of the content. Not only did World of Warcraft start with the highest quality of content in the field, the trends even show continuous improvements. Most people agree that the quality of many of the newer quests in the game is somewhat better than the original ones, which were already a big selling point for WoW.
  
  
• More things to do in the end game. The number of different activities in the end game has grown from the original level 60 end game to the TBC level 70 end game. That trend started already with the addition of Silithus, but TBC really added a lot here. Even if you are not raiding, there are a lot of different things to do at the level cap now, more dungeons in various difficulty levels, more quests (including daily quests), more reputations, and more PvP options. There are even more mini games, like bombing runs or the "Simon" game.
  
  
• Positive sum PvP. It is in the nature of PvP that somebody has to lose, and unlike PvE where the loser can be a monster that doesn't mind, players don't really like losing. World of Warcraft rewards players even when they lose, which keeps them playing. Critics call that "carebear PvP" for "welfare epics", but I strongly believe that this is the only way that PvP in a MMO can be viable for the long term.
  

So, these are the trends I see. Tell me if I have overlooked trends that you see in the design of World of Warcraft;