<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Blizzard games are as fanboy as anything else. In its current stage, anyone playing 'casually' (say, 4-5 hours a day, which is the average for MMORPGs) will get to level 60 in about 2 months easily. Some beta testers did 50-55 in 9 hours, so that puts 1-60 at 120 hours, and let's say you're only half as good as a seasoned EQ treadmill runner, so that's 240 hours/4 = 60 days = 2 months @ 4 hours a day. At that point you can either do the same thing all over again on another character, or do the raiding game that no one has a clue what it's going to be about and hope it is actually going to be good. Historically, no MMORPG has ever got the raiding game right on release, which is why they take a stupidly long time to level on purpose so you can make tweaks to the proposed endgame as you watch what players can and cannot do. Actually, a lot of the blind optimism on the endgame is because Blizzard has ex-EQ players on the staff working on the endgame. Of course, this largely ignores the fact that no game I know of that tries to go to players to design encounters of any kind has ever succeeded, because if you get someone who truly cares about the game, you'll get an encounter that is way too hard. If Furor and Tigole are going to do what they claim to have hated in EQ all the encounters will just be stupidily difficult that the avreage player will just get slapped by them without any possibility of winning. Actually, that'd a pretty gutsy move, and the right move, but I really doubt Blizard can withstand the inevitable whine that the game is too hard.
But, if you make the encounters easy, then people will beat them too fast, and since there is no time to slow people's progress via leveling, that means you'll run out of content and run out of things to do. I suppose you could always gank people in PvP, but how long can you do that? Then you'd have to wait for expansions for new things to do, and we know how fast Blizzard gets those out.
While it's okay to play say Diablo 2 to level 70 or whereever you think is 'done' and start over, when you're paying on a monthly level people want the ability to progress, or at least the illusion to be able to. I really don't see a lot of people getting to level 60 and then keep paying a monthly fee just to do that all over again, so WoW's playability will depend on how its endgame go, and history doesn't look favorably on Blizzard's side.</div>