You, dear sir, are a scumbag. Please find a hobby you have time for. Or try playing honestly for a change.

As for how WoW was when Tier 5 raid items were all the rage - Blizzard already nerfed it all to suit all the "I don't have time" guys. It is true that back when SSC and TK were new, you *had* to farm consumables for 4-5 hours a week to have the necessary items for proper raiding. You no longer need to do that. There is no need to farm consumables or just about anything for that matter. It's all casuali-zed by now. Heck, for the first three raid instances you do not need flasks, food buffs or mana potions at all - just drool and bash your head at the keyboard, then loot purple items.

Not really.

In WoW the gold has been non-issue since.. at least an year ago. The only situation where it matters any more is when you buy BOE epics or extremely rare drops from AH (which have highly inflated prices due to the ease of obtaining gold). And with these, the more you buy gold, the higher these prices inflate to - and they are all luxury items for scrubs that don't have the necessary social skills to raid. All gear that you actually want to wear, assuming you have a choice, is Bind on Pickup anyway - you have to kill the boss to loot the item, can't just buy it.

As for all other use of gold in WoW - item repairs, consumables, crafting... it is insignificant compared to the amount you get from just playing the game. There is NO NEED to farm gold in WoW any more. Period. Only players in my large WoW guild who are commonly broke are the PvP idiots who do nothing but arena all day long - unsurprisingly that doesn't reward them with gold while they keep spending gold to enchant and gem their shiny PvP epics. So you have to go do some PvE from time to time to fund your PvP activities? Oh. My. God.

As for the leveling... it's a major piece of the content of the game. Sure, people gripe that their alt number four or five is a pain to level as you have already done all the content a couple of times, but do you really need that alt number four or five? And if you think you do, why do you think you are entitled to cheat (by using a powerleveling service)?

There is "consumer demand" because lazy bum players who "can't be assed" to play the game want to cheat by buying ingame assets and currency with real money.

Once it becomes okay to cheat, only the cheaters will stay around. It's fine to cheat in single player games - all you are really doing is cheating yourself out of the proper experience. Cheating in multiplayer games (especially persistent multiplayer games) you'll just participate in destroying the game you are playing.

The only reason game companies are even looking at this is because enforcing the rules is expensive. Too many lazy bums around that need the banstick. Plus they look at how Asian companies rake in the money from idiots out there who all like to play "whoever has the most disposable income wins"-style game. SOE already tried this with EQ2 and it really didn't work - cheaters kept cheating on the regular servers and the gameplay and community on the "enabled" servers was a cesspit of teenagers trying to convert excess free time into dollars and lazy idiots feeding the teenagers with too much disposable income. Professional farmers stayed on the normal servers as black market prices were always higher and the "consumer demand" was higher on the servers where you could actually buy an advantage.

Cheating with real money is an advantage only when it is cheating. When everyone is doing it, it's just a stupid way to milk more money from all the people who bother to play the "game".

Yep, definitely need this.

No, we don't.

The people who did know are retired or dead, and plenty of critical data to recreate Saturn V is lost. Considering how the related technologies have advanced since then, it just doesn't make sense.

No. Phasing was already used in late Burning Crusade - there is one daily quest that uses it, and the whole isle of quel'danas used phasing as people were "opening it up". In that case the "phases" of the island happened to everyone, but the system was the same - you did stuff, at some point - poof - things changed in the world.

Blizzard is not stupid - before they bet their whole franchise on a complex piece of code, they tested it, then they tested it more, then they tested it in the live game. Once it was proven to be solid, quest developers went nuts with it in Wrath of the Lich King.

Same is true for a lot of stuff - like, say, vehicles. Some of the vehicle stuff is new, but you could already "turn into a dragon" while fighting Kil'jaeden in Sunwell Plateau... or actually turn into a ghost while fighting Teron Gorefiend in Black Temple way earlier. Again, small roles for a piece of code ("morph player into something else, give him new quickbar of abilities, disable old ones") which, when proven, is then "let loose" with the quest designers, who promptly went nuts with the idea.