My Dragons
MMORPG Design V - Content and Advancement
One of the big problems WoW is having is that developers spend a lot of their time (and developer time is the absolute limiting factor on how fast a game can grow) on content that only a small portion of the players will ever get to see. For example, I have never been in Molten Core, nor Ahn'Quiraj, and have visited precisely one instance in the Outlands, that being the first one. While my experience may be less experienced than typical, fewer than 5% of the members of WoWjutsu have visited the Black Temple...and to be in WoWjutsu in the first place, you have to have made at least one successful Karazahn run.
All of which is to say, dungeons you can't visit without gear from other dungeons, recursively through five or six layers, kind of suck.
The hardcore would deny this and call me a n00b who is unwilling to commit the time and effort needed, and in a way they're right; I have no interest in running the same dungeon every night for a month so that I can end up still missing two of the armor pieces I need to be competitive in the next dungeon on the circuit. That doesn't mean, however, that I wouldn't like to see that next dungeon--but barring some accommodating hardcore friends willing to play escort, I never will. Because I'm not willing to treat a computer game like a secondary job (one which I pay to do, I might add), a lot of developer time and effort is wasted on me and I get bored (as witness the fact that I haven't logged in to WoW in over a month).
The way to handle it? If you really want a complex attunement chain, that's fine--but make it so that one successful run of the prereq dungeon gets you what you need for the next one. If players want to run it over and over, collecting gear sets and magical foozles, that's cool and will be helpful for the next link in the chain, but don't make it a requirement.
Similarly, you get a lot of people who claim that "the game doesn't start till [whatever the level cap is]" and resent having to level every alt up to get to the bits they inexplicably consider fun. But letting someone just start a new character at the level cap, even if they pay for the privilege, leads to level 70s who don't know how to use traps or can't manage their sheeps or just can't hold aggro. The solution here, fortunately, is simple: once you have leveled a member of a given class to a given level, you can start new members of that class anywhere you like up to the max you've hit. Once you have a 20th-level hunter, you can start a new hunter anywhere between 1 and 20; once you have a 51st-level druid, oomkin can be yours at chargen if you so desire. It's by class because playing a mage isn't much like playing a paladin or a rogue or a shaman or whatever.
I am of course glossing entirely over how this fits into My Perfect MMORPG, in which there aren't any levels, but the general principle holds: whatever level of achievement you've reached, you can start there in the future. That way everyone's doing the full experience at least once, to learn how, but can thereafter skip it if it's not what they like1. There's the extra bonus that if your buddy who's just started playing needs help, you can put together an alt of appropriate level rather than having to make the experience worthless by bringing in something vastly too powerful.
1: Yes, this can be abused: buy an account with all the classes having been leveled, get your brother to do the leveling for you, whatever. But there's vastly less incentive to do that sort of thing once this system's implemented, and besides anything can be abused given enough ingenuity on the part of the abusers. C'est la vie.