World of Warcraft's success has indeed, as Morhaime suggests, become due more to its popularity than its content. While Blizzard certainly has a greater budget to spend on its MMORPG, that doesn't immediately lead to the conclusion that it's wisely spent. In fact, many World of Warcraft players would love to disagree - even if they are still paying a monthly fee.Morhaime said "The story behind us is the passionate community that has grown up around our games. . . While it's true that games like Lord of the Rings Online and Warhammer Online have less than one million subscribers, fans would agree that those games are hardly a failure.

World of Warcraft's development team, in fact, has long been in a trend away from the involvement that players not only long for, but demand. Although developers do tune into the communities, including opening up Q&A opportunities on the game's official forums, responses are rarely more positive than a "We'll look into it" or "It's in development already" from the staff. Changes long suggested by the community also come to very slow fruition: take, for example, that it has taken months into World of Warcraft's second expansion to finally see new druid forms created, the Horde equivalent of the Winterspring Saber is still not implemented, and yet in the span of a few patches certain classes have watched their abilities flip flop without request (such as Death Knight's Frost Presence armor value.)In fact, some would argue that the lower subscriber base leads to greater quality. The greater a community's size, the less chance there is for a voice of reason to be heard from the fan base - and even lesser chance for the developers to take ear to player concerns. Eleven million opinions on how a game should be developed are much harder to sort through than 500,000 opinions.