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My bias exists because I have opinions and don't shy away from them. If you think an opinion is "bias", then that's it.

The point is that I usually justify my "bias". In the sense that it is a logic conclusion than OMG, HYPE!

EQ2 has 1/10 of WoW's subscribers, from my point of view there IS a reason. This reason has a concrete motivation.

I write 90% of the times about game design. I tend to recognize good game design, and point at game design that looks bad to me.

For my opinion you can go read a comment that I wrote right at WoW's release, when its success, and in particular its scope, wasn't as obvious as it is now.

About Vanguard they are saying NOW that they'll do some work on the animations. About a year ago people still complained about the animations, then Brad said that they were all placeholders and that they were waiting a lot of motion capture to arrive and implement in the game. Those animations arrived and they still looked crap, now it seems that they are saying again that it's all placeholders.

Excuse me if I'm skeptical. If one day Vanguard will have beautiful animations then I'll surely recognize that.

Now the problem is that what looks bad in the game are the single animations, not the technology itself. So will the new technology really help? Maybe, but only if the single animations will improve greatly. And that can happen only if they hire talented animations, because you can buy all the technology you want, but you still need someone who knows how to use it.

And beside this there's also the quite consistent limit that was put in the design stage: all the human creatures share the same body and animations. So all the races will feel exactly the same.

That's a limit that no technology will solve.

So, take the fact that despite all the revisions the animations are still quite awful, add the design choice to clone the animations on all humanoid characters, and you can see why I'm skeptical that we'll see a significant leap forward.

I still think it's a big mistake to consider the graphical appearance of monsters and characters more important than how they move. And this is something particularly consolidated in the mmorpg industry.