For an expansion ostensibly designed for newbies, there are some curiously unfriendly things going on for new players, both in-game and on the business side.

Might it be worth noting that Cataclysm is targeted not at the new player but at the veteran? Yes, it’s a revamp of the whole world, but you still need the original game, TBC, Wrath *and* the CAT box just to play as a Worgen or Goblin. Yes, the world is being reworked for everyone, but the CAT stuff isn’t really for new players, who would have to get through a massive paywall, *and* realize that they would be paying a subscription. With the market as it is, there are viable alternatives that don’t have that startup cost.

If new players could jump in as Worgen and Goblins with a CAT purchase alone, I’d be much more inclined to believe that newbies would have a reason to purchase the box. As it is, I believe the new races are for veterans looking for a new alt to take for a spin.

Bigger point being, veterans are already invested, and can wait for stable servers with solid patches. Sure, there are those who fuss about having nothing to do (rightly or no), but give those players a break and let them play with their Black Friday and Christmas non-WoW games. Have a nice, shiny, stable game ready for play after the post-Christmas buzz has worn off.

…but that’s not likely now. That’s just what I’d have done six months ago.

Hell, the hardware problems of the original XBOX 360 dwarf anything that’s ever happened on WoW. Did you have to send your PC into Blizzard for a new one because WoW fried your hardware? In fact the PS1 is probably on it’s 15th+ hardware revision now, to fix bugs and cost reduce the product. Revisioning happens constantly on consoles, they are just more in control of the environments that WoW is, so they can hide the process better.

Plus, my original arguement doen’t even logically conclude at “doomed”, that’s quite a bit of hyperbole on your part.  My argument, which isn’t even an argument so much as a statement of fact, is that quality checks have been and will always be the last step of a product development process. You can’t quality check something until it is done. There’s no such thing as designing in quality then adding features. The moment you add the smallest feature, the quality is immediately suspect and everything needs to be completely retested. In the software development world, this is called regression testing, which can take months and require an army of testers. The software developed where I work is so small compared to WoW it’s negligible, yet regression testing requires test software almost as complex as the code in the product, a team of people, and at least two months to complete. The moment we add a new feature, we start over.  I also design products that are mission critical. Some markets, mission critical ones like life-sustainingl machines and industrial equipment, can sustain the longer development cycles to allow for more quality checks before new products are released; others, like the obvious gaming market, can’t. There are already tons of people screaming and cancelling accounts for lack of new content on WoW. To wait until everything was completely 100% bug-free (which is also an impossibility, because designs are too complicated and engineers are not clairvoyant) would be the death of WoW.

WoW is easily an order of magnitude (if not several) more complicated than any console game.
-It runs on non-homogeneous hardware that is not in the developer’s control (find me a console game with a sound and video options panel, let alone one as complicated as WoW’s)
-It’s massively multiplayer (thousands of ppl playing on the same server). Most console online games are quite less than 100 interacting at a time.
-Expansions have to deal with legacy code. Console games get to start from scratch every release.
-It’s a wide open play style. 99% of console games have a flow that is infinitely more restrictive than WoW.

There are actually software development theories that predict the number of bugs and how long it should take to fix them.  They are amazingly accurate.  Given how complex and massive WoW is, I’d actually commend Blizzard for their efforts thus far.