I honestly find this absurd.

I suppose if you told me that they had to remodel every item of equipment in the game to make the new models work, then I might sort of understand. But even then...

The thing is, I used to work in the film effect business as a 3D guy and I get how long it can take to make a great model - but we are talking weeks of full time work by a talented artist, not months or years. There is going to be a number of weeks to get all the IK (the skeletal animations) just right. But again, we are not talking years of work here.

Also, there is no shortage of brilliant 3D modelers and animators out there. With Blizzard's massive gross income they could have hired a dedicated 3D artist for each race to model them. Something that should have been done last year too.

But hey - let's just get to the truth of the matter. Blizzard is a public corporation and their #1 goal (like all corps) is profit for their shareholders. Blizzard will only do what is necessary to sell copies and win back subscribers. If enough people bail WoW complaining about the graphics of their race, you bet it will be fixed. But it has to be a big enough problem for WoW to address it.

Just look at some of the features in Mists like AoE looting. They could have done that ages ago, but finally a game has managed to keep a million+ of their own subs which isn't great for WoW from a shareholder standpoint. I bet we will see any and every good idea of Bioware come over to WoW as long as SWTOR manages to keep over 1m subs going.