WoW doesn't try to get ambitious with their designs. Frankly, they don't need it. The player base is perfectly happy to have the story if they want it, and ignore it if they don't. It's all about the bottom line...
In fact, Blizzard's introduction of the new looking for group system has shown that someone must have done some serious feedback analysis and realized they were getting too narrow-focused on high-end power gaming activities like raiding and PvP. Other online games have followed this same pattern only to see their player base deteriorate as the game gets too heavy and overloaded for new players to get involved with it. By doing cross-server grouping and making it easy for players to participate, they've opened up a lot of content that was getting passed by or ignored. I'd surmise that character scaling is the next thing to go in, so high-level players can enjoy low-level content without balance issues.
Total surprises could be a good thing. :)
I link you to Chris Crawford's short article on Emergence in Software: http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/Game%20Design/Emergence.html
WoW doesn't try to get ambitious with their designs. Frankly, they don't need it. The player base is perfectly happy to have the story if they want it, and ignore it if they don't. It's all about the bottom line...
In fact, Blizzard's introduction of the new looking for group system has shown that someone must have done some serious feedback analysis and realized they were getting too narrow-focused on high-end power gaming activities like raiding and PvP. Other online games have followed this same pattern only to see their player base deteriorate as the game gets too heavy and overloaded for new players to get involved with it. By doing cross-server grouping and making it easy for players to participate, they've opened up a lot of content that was getting passed by or ignored. I'd surmise that character scaling is the next thing to go in, so high-level players can enjoy low-level content without balance issues.