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You seem to have a penchant to warping what people say. I never said that is "poor quality" design (the poor quality is elsewhere, the ridiculous storylines and characters, the laughable art direction, and so forth), but it does ensure that the game is popular regardless of quality.
It's actually a very smart design choice to grab the target Blizzard wants and more money. Unfortunately it comes with drawbacks, primarily the extremely poor quality of the community, but that impacts only a percentage of the players, for sure not Blizzard.
The quality of the community is dependent on where you go, who you ask, and how you intend to spend your time. The WoW forums, with perhaps the exception of the server forums themselves, are probably the last place you want to look for the good people in the community. If PvE is your thing, you'll probably want to head to a place like Elitist Jerks or Tankspot, or some other forum that doesn't put up with wankers who don't back up their claims that X is OP/UP without the numbers. If you PvP, head over to ArenaJunkies, where you're going to need an arena rating of 2200+ just to post in the good section of the forums. RPers can try one of the LJ communities. If your expectation is to jump straight in-game and have the good parts of the community just jump right out at you, welcoming you to the game and congratulating you on making the right choice, you're just setting yourself up for failure.
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Many other games on the market are much more selective early on with their target. This means that their community will inevitably benefit from an higher percentage of players that are actually prepared to interact with an online community, as third graders and similar examples simply arent, most of the time. And they get frustrated and pushed away by mechanics that they don't have the patience to cope with.
I would argue that adults are more likely to get pushed away by unfamiliar mechanics as opposed to kids, simply because adults are less likely to afford themselves a mistake or two, and are therefore more likely to beat themselves up when things go wrong. Kids don't seem to care as much when they screw up, and just focus on doing better next time, though we're also more forgiving to kids when they make mistakes as compared to adults. Perhaps that's something to take into consideration the next time the barista gets your coffee order wrong.