This game has over 8 million players apparently. Aside from being a license to print money, it's success i woudl imagine most game designers - of all stripes - drool over. So shouldn't it be the best and best selling rpg ever? Also why wouldn't WotC pickit up and use it for D&D as an actual D&D game?

That's a good question, I'm gonna think about it for a while before answering.
What I can tell you is that I love the WoW Rpg, I like to think of it as D&D meets WFRP, sort of.

People who play WoW probably aren't all that interested in pen and paper roleplaying. They already have their form of time-consuming fun, and probably don't need another. Just like I wouldn't care about D&D: The MMORPG.

WoW players don't have the time to eat, sleep or pursue other activities.
To attend p&p games, the players would have to leave their rooms. Their parents probably wouldn't like that...
The WoW game doesn't mirror the computer experience. It uses the D20 system and there's no visual feedback of nude night elves dancing.
Adding numbers by myself? Too. Friggin'. Hard.

Because it's terrible.

The game designers couldn't decide if they wanted it to be a D&D variant, or WoW the TRPG, and as a result, the game serves poorly as both.  

By and large the only serviceable thing is the races.  Some of the classes do OK, but most are horrid bastard children of their respective counterparts in each game, and generalyl horribly implemented.

The spell casters in particular suffer, as the spell lists are completely half assed and at times even incomplete.  Some of them are just D&D spells, but at random levels, others are D&D spells with the names changed, and the spells that actually originate from WoW frequently don't work in any fashion that resembles their WoW counterparts.  Large numbers of the WoW game's spells are simply not there.  This is all made even more insulting by the fact that the developers didn't even actually bother to to do each class individually, instead, all of WoW's caster classes are treated as subtypes of two base classes, the Arcanist and the Healer, complete with a shared base list with each of the two types, despite the WoW originals not sharing any spells at all.

The engineering system was an intriguing idea, but is so utterly vague as to be almost worthless as a system, leaving most of the actual interpretation to the GM and player to work out.

The blame of course rests squarely on their Blizzard liason, apparently.  With the EQ RPG, and even one of the new prestige classes for the WoW RPG in a later sourcebook (the Enchanter), SSS/WW proved they are quite capable at producing a game that captures the feel of their digital originals.  But, apparently the folks at Blizzard are big D&D fans, and pushed hard towards the D&D variant angle, and took an extremely hands-on, nitpicky approach to their involvement that resulted in the utter mess of a bad D&D conversion that ultimately saw print.

On top of all this, the game doesn't even include all that much detailed setting information, despite there being reams of lore written for the Warcraft series.  

It's a shame, because Warcraft is a great world, and it would've been good fun to see a tabletop adaptation as faithful as the EQ one, as it being the better game in it's original form would no doubt have proved it to be a pretty impressive game in tabletop form.

Instead, they couldn't make up their damn minds what to do with it, and the game ultimately fails.

Which is why it sells for crap.  Because it's a crap game.

Quote from: MelanPeople who play WoW probably aren't all that interested in pen and paper roleplaying. They already have their form of time-consuming fun, and probably don't need another. Just like I wouldn't care about D&D: The MMORPG.

I think this is the correct answer. WoW players generally don't care for Pen and Paper RPGs.

Well to be honest I haven't actually tried it, that means run/play, but I gave the pdf's a look and at first sight it didn't seem like a crappy game.
Maybe deeper inspection would reveal its "crappiness".

Quote from: ClaudiusI think this is the correct answer. WoW players generally don't care for Pen and Paper RPGs.

My previous D&D group, and my previous WoW group, were one in the same.  The lead designers, and many of the higher-ups at Blizzard, are hardcore D&D fans.  There are a number of spells and abilities in WoW ripped straight out of the D&D books.

QuoteWell to be honest I haven't actually tried it, that means run/play, but I gave the pdf's a look and at first sight it didn't seem like a crappy game.
Maybe deeper inspection would reveal its "crappiness".

I had exactly that experience.  It looked really cool at first, and I was initially very excited by it, but the more I dug into it, the more I read, and the more I tried to make sense of the mechanics, the more it pissed me off.

There's some gens hiding in there, but there's a lot of crap.

Quote from: MelanPeople who play WoW probably aren't all that interested in pen and paper roleplaying.

4 out of the 5 players in my D&D group right now are hardcore WoW players and are D&D noobs.  Of course it's very possible that they might like the WoW rpg better than D&D if they were to try that.  The problem is who's running it?  Network externalities and all that...

I agree with Melan, and as both a WoW player and roleplayer I can safely say that I'm sick of Azeroth and don't want to further explore it at the gaming table.

J Arcane's got the right of it.  There's some infuriatingly fun ideas trapped in the crapulent amber shell that is the WoW tabletop RPG.  After struggling for many levels as a goblin tinker, I finally gave up in frustration.  Every single one of J Arcane's complaints was something that came up in actual play.

The Warcraft "mythos" is ripe for being made into a proper fantasy TRPG, but the current implementation isn't it.

It's been said, but worth saying again.

P&P RPG'ers that play WoW play WoW because they want a CRPG feel to a favorite RPG that they already have - statistically that'll already be D20.  Computer gamers that Play WoW and don't already play RPG's - are just that computer games and they have no interestin playing the P&P version.

Azeroth as a setting is well tuned for a video game.  It's tiny.  It has clear simplistic factions.  It has great evil bosses that threaten the world that can be beaten by low level characters and then some more later.  It has a colourful, cartoon feel that translates extremely well to a computer monitor.

None of these tuning decisions are particularly well suited to a good pencil and paper game.  The setting also carries the burden of canon, which cuts down on potential purchases from those who just don't like to get into that quagmire -- people who like to play inside canonically defined settings seem to be a minority, however enthusiastic.  L5R, for example, is played exclusively by zealots, not fans.

I doubt it matters how good the game itself is -- the problem isn't that WoW players buy it and don't play it but rather that they aren't even tempted to buy it.  That tells me the setting is broken.

Quote from: RedFoxJ Arcane's got the right of it.  There's some infuriatingly fun ideas trapped in the crapulent amber shell that is the WoW tabletop RPG.  After struggling for many levels as a goblin tinker, I finally gave up in frustration.  Every single one of J Arcane's complaints was something that came up in actual play.

The Warcraft "mythos" is ripe for being made into a proper fantasy TRPG, but the current implementation isn't it.

Man, you got lured in by the tinker too?  

I was so fucking pissed when I went through all that effort to make a character, but saved my gold so I could make up new inventions as the game went on, only to find out that for actual time tables, the game still uses the standard D&D craft skill rules, meaning that, with the massive prices of the engineering stuff, it would take literal years to build anything.  

I was PISSED.

The vast majority of WOW players are gamers, not role-players.  They're in it to raid, run 5-man dungeons or do PVP; the lore is secondary to those gameplay interests.  It's a game about phat loots, mad XP and stroking your e-cock; even on the Role-Play servers, role-players get shat upon.  (I play on two RP servers, so I see this first-hand.)  Tabletop gaming is something alien to them, because it doesn't have what they're in WOW to get.