The REAL expansion - gaming article

[Raelynn]

That's the point. I'm not arguing that new instances is bad (I think that's good -- I said so in my original post), I'm arguing that putting them 10 levels farther out is bad. Capping at level 30 would be fine with me (as long as there was still access to the top tier spells). I'd like to play the "end-game" content (instances/pvp/etc) with another class or two, but don't want to grind through everything again. 30 levels is a long enough time to get a decent feel for how the class is played without becoming too monotonous.
New areas are fine. They could allow specialization of characters, like say with hero classes? More talents (which it sounds like they might be doing -- hard to tell how much though). New talent trees. New classes even? Housing? Enhanced character appearance customization. As for items, stop making the number bigger and just change the look or specialization of some of them. It sounds stupid to me to make 3 different versions of the same sword with different colors, but based on the demand for certain types of "glow" enchantments, even of particular colors, there are a lot of people that enjoy the dress-up part of the game.

An MMO is a world; there are a billion things they could do that don't involve obsoleting existing content.
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Blizzard is trying to do a bunch of the things that you suggested. I have to agree with them though on the classes. For one added class, it must not only be balanced across the content already in the game, it must be balanced across all 10 existing classes (even more when you start adding even more). It becomes too much to add in classes compared to adding in actual content for people. Don't get me wrong. I'd love to see new classes, but for the foreseeable future, it won't happen.

As for the level increase, I actually agree with someone that posted on the forums (surprising!). He basically said that there are two general routes that Blizzard could've gone to progress characters at this point: more levels or better items. Each of these was done in the past by certain online games, I believe his examples were EQ and DoAC respectively. With the progression by items, the "casual" gamers get completely left behind, as they are already complaining about the problems dealing with end game items and progressions in the current game. With the added levels, people complain that the stuff that they got that are now "worthless" but the same thing happened with the blue sets after MC and BWL in all truth. The guilds that got this stuff is already a step ahead because they have the items that will allow them to access the content sooner, and the "casual" gamers now will have a better chance to get to the endgame stuff they couldn't do before since it will become easier after they get to a higher level.

The thing I do agree is that there could've been alternate advancement through something such as hero classes, but that opens up a huge can of worms (much like epic levels in D&D).