"Seriously, for all the times that Blizz has said it "doesn't have time", or "its in our plans", for stuff like resizing troll feet to something that doesn't look like its from a carttoon, or doing something with the HORRIFIC human facial models, it still amazes me that they had 'time' to pull of Transmog."

As far as I can tell, transmogrification is a programming issue, not an artistic one. It's not about making new models, but displaying old ones instead of the items' actual models. Therefore, no new models need to be made for transmogrification to work, so the art department's not involved. Blizzard saying that their artists are working on other things than updating old models is still completely valid.

It always amazes (depresses) me to see so many people who don't understand even remotely how video game development works.

It's just like any business.

Imagine, if you will, that you're at a restaurant. You wish they had more variety.

"Well, we'd like to add more to the menu, but our kitchen's understaffed at the moment. We just don't have the resources to prepare more food..."

What you (and so many others) are doing is then pointing at the waitresses and bus boys and going, "Well you obviously have staff to do take orders and take dirty plates! Why aren't they cooking!?"

Well, guess why? Because they aren't cooks. That's not what they were hired to do, or what they specialize in. You put them in the kitchen, they burn the food, nobody's happy.

So, you say, "But they're rich? Why don't they hire more people!?"

To which I respond: http://us.blizzard.com/company/careers/

Doesn't matter how much money they have, people still have to apply for the jobs and meet their quality standards.

Actually, in response to MusedMoose and Suzaku, fixing model artwork in Warcraft is not an artistic challenge at all. It is solely a programming one. You see, everything in WoW, from the base models to the gear, is key-framed. That means for each and every unique character model and each and every animation, each piece of unique mesh needs to have it's position for each frame recorded. Granted, this process can be easily automated, but it's a throwback to the 1990's before we had Vertex Shaders, screens bigger than 1024x768, and processers pushing the 800MHz mark. Essentially, the majority of WoW's rendering hasn't changed since Warcraft 3 in terms of the algorithms involved. Applications like the WoW Model Viewer are a great resource for seeing these individual combinations of states and frames.

Changing the models themselves would be easy. Updating the graphics engine from a keyframed one to a physics-alike procedural shader based one is a massive challenge- and it would be a destructive one.

And it's a challenge that Blizzard has job postings to try and fix. (Yes, I applied, but I think I was a bit too new in the business to qualify. They want people with previous game development. Fun Fact for Trivial Pursuit: to get into the game design industry, you must first have experience in the game design industry!)

Haha, right on Suzaku!

Blizzard probably doesn't want to upgrade graphics because they want everyone to be able to play WoW. That 10 year old computer can still to this day play WoW but it couldn't even download (let alone open) some of the games on the market today. So to people like you that are always complaining about the graphics... Blizzard is running a business and they want to keep people playing. They are better off losing the 100 people like you who want graphics to be updated to current then the thousands of people who only play WoW and don't want to or can't afford (recession anyone?) to upgrade there computers.

Right. Rarely does anyone who wants something instead of...compare apples to apples.
As far as troll feet looking less "cartoony", well this is a video game. FFS look at night elf ears. You are telling me that's normal? Belf eyebrows? Worgen sniffing. Tauren scratching. I mean we could go on and on. I think most of these things are working as intended. Whether you like it now or not I am fairly sure at somepoint everyone will try Transmogrification. IF you don't like the hype about it, don't read the comments about it. You could totally read the facts and see what it's about. The facts are not hyping it up. We the players are. Pretty easy fix ;)

@ Matthew -

Thanks for the info - I didn't know that about WoW's animation; it makes a lot more sense now when the devs talk about the difficulties they have with the models. I remember reading something about how they didn't think WoW would be around anywhere near this long when they first made it, and that explains a lot.

Also: good luck with finding work in the gaming industry! I've applied to several jobs at Blizzard, no response each time. But it's worth it to keep trying. ^_^

no. It seems like a "feature" that should be added on to general item customization. The ability to use an item as a "template" to apply to all items of that type (armor, weapon, etc.), but the lack of true customization, like every other fantasy game has had for the past dozen years, makes it a bit of a Meh. GIve us Dye kits, made by scibes, and armor "packs" made by BS, tailor, or leatherworker, weapon kits by BS or Engineers for ranged, etc... then add this "feature" that makes all your stuff look the same....but, at least it's a start.

@Suzaku Your post would be amazing except that Blizzard isn't interest in putting more people on WoW. They've taken most of them away to work on SC2, Diablo 3, and Titan.