Nippon Ichi games can be formulaic, it's true. It's not really true to say they "stopped innovating the moment the first Disgaea game became an unexpected international success." It's just that the games where NIS has tried things haven't been the commercial successes about which people hear. Phantom Brave and Makai Kingdom both tried to do completely new, different things with the SRPG genre, but neither took off. Both eliminated the grid, and introduced new, unique means of unit creation. I don't find the gridless system to work for me, but they weren't just pushing a Disgaea clone. Soul Nomad and the World Eaters is an entirely different subgenre of SRPG. It plays drastically differently from traditional SRPGs in the Tactics Ogre/FFT mold, and is quite a lot of fun, in my personal opinion, provided you're willing to take a back seat during battle and let your squad design carry the day. ZHP takes the old roguelike formula, updates it in interesting ways, and does more to revitalize it than any game since probably Nethack. NIS keeps the Disgaea series Disgaea, and as far as I'm concerned, there's nothing wrong with that. When I buy a sequel, I want evolution; I don't want to buy something that's wildly different from the thing that I liked enough to want a sequel in the first place. Outside of Disgaea, they really are trying things. The only truly unifying aspect of NIS titles (in terms of gameplay at least) is a large emphasis on powerleveling, but I wouldn't call that a lack of innovation, so much as an acknowledgment that it's something their core audience enjoys.

To be fair here, you've got a point--but at the same time, it's the console games I've got that have the longest single-player. Take a look at the Disgaea series. I finished Disgaea 2 in 60-70 hours, and had fun throughout, because it's INCREDIBLY complex, and invites the player to screw over the game instead of the other way around. In any event, we're in agreement in general, I think. Reduced complexity, fewer options, shorter gameplay is not what we want. When Dyack, before Too Human was released, tried telling gamers we didn't want more than a ten hour game, I was appalled.

Perhaps the people examining this data missed a crucial external variable: selection. There are an order of magnitude more games being released today than there were 10 years ago. I'm a heavy gamer (work in the industry), and seldom finish long games. That does NOT mean I want them short! It means another game I wanted to play came out, and I moved on.

You can move characters in WoW as often as you like, though there's a cooldown to prevent people from abusing the system. It was six months when it debuted, but it's not a service I use, so while I think it's much shorter now, I don't know the actual limitation. The real issue is that it's $25 per character. Want to jump ship on a server you've been on for a while, with all ten characters? $250. Blech.

The problem is, Aion's channels exist inside traditional servers. They solve a problem of overcrowding and spawn camping in zones, which is good since Aion's zones tend to be less sprawling than other MMOs, but they do nothing at all about things like server queues, playing with people on other servers, and so forth. As the original article to which I was replying was about problems like queues, I don't consider Aion's channels a solution (to queues--as mentioned, they resolve some other issues).

Respawning is easy. It's not coming back as a level 1 dung beetle that's hard.

I fail to see how multiple servers is better at all. With an architecture like Champions', if the people with whom you want to play aren't in your zone, you go to them. With traditional server separation, such as WoW's or Aion's, your only hope is that server transfers or the like are allowed. I'm also not sure that it complicates things in any significant way. What's complicated about clicking "Change instance," and looking at the top of the list--which is where the instances in which you have friends, teammates, and guildmates will appear? The confusion of "I'm standing right by [landmark here] and I don't see you!" doesn't really last long.

Champions Online has also launched with a single world architecture. Each zone has multiple instances, dividing the population in dozens of copies of each region, across which players can freely move if they wish to do so. Zones with friends, supergroup (guild members), and party members have priority, of course. These instances CAN fill, but if they do--just get your friends and all go to a new one.

If I'm stuck, I'm not having fun. The end. There's more than one kind of gamer. Many play for the challenge, to be sure. Some play for diversion from frustration, and frustration with the game does not help. I play to "see stuff" as Penny Arcade once put it. If I'm stuck, screw that; I want to see what comes next. Granted, the last doesn't apply to puzzle games, but the developer needs to realize that he may have a significant number of players who aren't playing to be challenged.

Well of course. All the problems you mention, though, could occur any time you make your data anything but severely vulnerable. Torture can't be easily helped, but there are ways of making it harder to get the desired result (keyfiles you don't have quick access to, for example), assuming the data is important enough to prepare for torture and accept it. PEBKAC problems are always going to be there, and always have to be dealt with or prevented; encryption doesn't make people unstupid. Sadly, I'm yet to find anything that'll do that. I thought I was in luck with an old UT2k3 patch with the note "makes players brighter," but that didn't seem to do it either.