First of all, let me say, I agree with your observations and your general assumptions.

But I would summarise your observations to the more striking pronouncement “the Game lost it’s female touch”.

Looking around our community (we do not call it a guild, since it is not limited to WoW, nor do we play on one Server), we started
wit a ratio of 40/60 female to male. Mostly because our girlfriends or wives, who up to WoW just wrinkled their noses when we were playing,
instantly fell in love with the tiny gnomes, elegant nightelves and the pinky world around them.

Although the systematic of the game itself was quiet new to the majority, the gamplay was intuitive. They recognised how to manage their ressources,
they learned the meaning of “Aggro/Hate” and found their way into the game.

In general, fighting was more a matter of reacting to a certain situation and chosing your ability, rather than knowing which action the Boss will perform and executing a learned rotation.
Our Ladies, rarely read any Guides or Spreadsheets, and at the beginning, their favorite class was the druid, followed by the priest later. Today we mostly find Ladies playing healer, since the healer’s job usually is more intuitive rather than calculated.

If I compare my girlfriends UI today with the one at the beginning, it apears to me, like a different mini-Game within the Game, where she hits a pulsing button with a certain Click combination as fast as possible without realising much of the fight around her.

The point is, that the game design at the moment, allows or even encourages this “game slot optimisation”. Most DDs are caught in their routines and supporting Addons.
Although we are a very “settled” community and we know each other personal for years know, I am still surprised how often the Question “What happened” arises. Not that they are not paying attention, but the game directed their attention away from the Encounter. What is even more puzzling, is the fact that even though Boss Mods guide you through a fight, in many cases the relevant information does not reach the player, because dozends of Messages, Raid Warnings and Timer are turning his Screen into an Asian Version of Bloomberg.

So, as you already have guessed, my concern is that the game has become to mathematical.

A rotation is the best combination of Spells in a set time.
Spending your talent points is the best combination of talents to fullfill your role.
Boss Encounter are based on the calculation of damage, interrupting the players and avoidance.

Most essential information can not be acquired in the game. You will not find any information about capable Statts like Hit, Expertise or Defense.

We do have talent trees with wounderful utility talents, but at the end it comes down to a handful of “cockie cutter” builds, all optimised but no
fun at all.
Remember your first 40 Man Raids, when Healing was such a problem, that your meeles get used to bandage themselves? Now imagine your
Retribution Paladin and his supporting heals in that situation and listen to your cheering rogues.

Our current system has no room for utility, because utility is incalculable.

Out of curiosity, we flicked through Blizzards Job posting in the US and were quiet surprised that they even hire “Scouts” on certain Universities.
So their focus is on a males,between 20-25 Years with a mathematical background. Mathematical in this case is meant to be the thing in common to
technical, IT or natural Science.

In other words, the game is more “arcade” to favor its clientel. You could easily make the game more challenging by bringing Mana and Aggro back into
the game, but the average Nerd would not consider that to be fun, since it adds the tactical element.

I know this may sound a bit wired, but as it is just thrown in, I did not have the chance to sort my ideas in a fashionable way. I still hope, the basic thought comes across.

A small portion of the playerbase actually figures the game out, often by hacking. In FFXI people dat hacked the quest text and put it on forums before the update even was downloadable. The rest just follow the lead, the noobs don’t know it exists or ignore it.

I’d love to be able to actually figure out instead of being told to google it or use third party tools.

So the only way to figure things out for yourself is to take lots and lots of logs and figure out how to parse them offline. I’m not assuming that people don’t like to figure things out (although I’m pretty sure a lot really prefer not to), but I am absolutely certain than in current MMOs, the majority of people just look stuff up. How does having a better talent spec really make you feel smarter than anyone when all you had to do was look it up on EJ? How much figuring out really went into that?

There’s still enough to figure out in MMOs, mostly to do with positioning, handling specific encounters, and situational awareness. I think they’d be better as games if they were designed such that people genuinely could figure out their classes enough to play in endgame just by levelling them.

1) You are assuming that people don’t like “figuring things out,” that this is only a hassle. Do you consider writing this blog a hassle? It certainly would be more fun if you just gave up the blog and played Bejeweled or something.

I think figuring things out is a big part of the enjoyment. Having a better talent spec makes you feel smarter than a poorly specced player. Figuring out how to beat fights makes you feel like a better strategist, even if you only looked up those fights online. It is all part of making the player feel superior.

2) You are assuming harder = more fun. Failing more often is not more fun. Difficulty is only a necessity because if things are TOO easy, they are devalued as an accomplishment.

However, this is largely based in perception. WoW does a great job of convincing mediocre players that they succeed in things not because those things are easy, but because they personally are skilled players. People want to think the things they are passing are hard, but first and foremost they need to pass them.

Most games, especially MMOs, seem to assume a certain amount of knowledge and experience from the player when they drop them into the world. I’d hazzard a guess at that it’s one of the reasons why WoW was so popular – Blizzard didn’t try to target current MMO gamers, they went out and found new ones and made it easy enough to appeal to them.