Here's how to improve WOW and bring the WAR to World of Warcraft.
1) Create a new gigantic continent, generously populate it with wildlife and mines, but no buildings and NPC's.
2) What you do in Vegas stays in Vegas. The stuff you collect in this new continent doesn't go to the mindless grind-world. But you can use stuff in the grind-world in Vegas. Also no flying mounts so strategic chokepoints actually work and there are no flying combat mechanics to speak of.
3) Allow any 1 player to plop down any building they want: towers, houses, blacksmith buildings, keeps, castles, etc. Your type of building depends on your race, so humans can plop down human blacksmiths and undead can plop down undead blacksmiths. Yeah, just like in Warcraft RTS games. The purpose of these buildings is like RTS games.
4) The cost and hitpoints of these buildings is NOT Eve Online style where it takes you 5 years of grinding to to build one lousy POS. It should take 5 minutes of 1 player mine-grinding to build a small house or an hour of 1 player mine-grinding away to build a keep. And the hitpoints are not Eve Online style either where it has a bajillion hitpoints that takes 20 players 10 hours of constant pounding to bring it down, it takes 1 player 5 minutes to bring down a small house or 1 player 1 hour to destroy a keep.
5) Equalize levels and equipment bonuses, everyone is at the same level. Although going in as a level 1 with limited amount of skills, weapon/armor modifiers, and professions would still be a considerable disadvantage.
6) Allow players with professions to craft weapons/armors/gem stuff for the NPC's they hire, just like they beef up their own characters. Say your average crafting recipe in the mindless grind world takes like 10 copper to create a glove. Multiply it by 100. You use 10 copper to create 100 NPC gloves for an army of NPC's you want to hire. Then you can arm your naked NPC's with what you want, customizing them. So if you're a maxed out blacksmith, and you want to create 20 warriors following you, you can do it.
-The added benefit of a system like this is creating massive demand for the low-level crafting materials, instead of focusing the economy on all of the top end stuff, which makes the economy totally lame. NPC's you arm are going to be dying like flies, just like in an RTS game.
7) Allow players to control the actions of NPC's they hire, creating patrol way points for defense, auto-mining for gatherer NPC's, chase distance (in case enemy players like to kite allot), or just follow the player around as your little army.
8) No set flag capture rules, the goal is to control raw material resources not "capture the flag" *rolls eyes*
There you go, you just got 1 million more subscribers who will never leave the game, and created meaningful PVP, not mindless grinding for the sake of grinding, not mindless PVP for the sake of PVP.
This should require minimal effort on the devs part, all of the buildings are already standardized and modeled, all of the NPC's are already standardized and modeled, everything is already balanced, all of the professions are already modeled just add an X100 modifier.
.
.
.
.
.
No, they would rather work on increasing the level cap (been there, done that), more groovy looking weapons/armor that somehow look worse than the original Tiered ones (been there done that) more zones to grind in (been there done that), another meaningless profession (been there done that), and pandas. Ugh