At BlizzCon every year, Blizzard puts on a SC2 tournament, a WC3 tournament, and a WoW arena tournament. The SC2 tournament is well attended most of the convention, and packed for the big matches (as in, you're not getting close to a chair unless you've been camping one all day). The WC3 tournament would be fairly sparsely attended if it weren't in the same place as the SC2 tournament, so people will be camping out there and either lamenting how boring WC3 is to watch or getting someone to hold their seats so they can go get some food. The WoW arena tournament is... not well attended; there were chairs available for the final (which last year went past the "closing ceremony" so there was literally nothing else going on).

There really is something about a game that makes it more or less watchable. WoW arenas are not all that fun to watch because there's a high density of important things happening at the same time, so it's difficult to understand as a spectator, and unless you're already a fairly high-level player you have no idea what those things are, so that locks out most of your potential spectators. On the other hand, a bronze-level player can understand what's going on in a pro-level SC2 match, even if the pro is chugging along at 200 APM.

You've never been in a WoW beta or PTR before, have you?

Yeah, Blizzard doesn't really do innovation. They take other games' features and add polish. It actually ends up working, because most of the "more creative games" have large gaps somewhere, and if you mash all of them together into one less creative game, you end up with more people playing it than the total of its component parts.

Specifically, the flying thing took so long because they didn't originally design the zones for flying (which CoH did). In the current world there are large stretches of flat textures, perspective tricks (the cathedral in Stormwind), false walls, and so forth. It took them until an expansion that rebuilt most of the old world for them to be able to correct that.

Scan Complete!

423,827
Viruses Found!

A New Record!!

"Waaugh! That is not a small number!! That is a big number!!! What'm I gonna do?!"

Actually, the part about jumping not recalculating your position until you landed was known to pre-WotLK raiders, for the exact reason you describe. The Death Grip bug just made it more obvious to people who hadn't quite figured out why jumping out of fire was a bad idea.

Well, that, and they just sent out a huge wave of beta invites last week, and all of those people are currently bringing the death knight area/Borean Tundra/Howling Fjord to their knees.