WOW Promotions: Manifestations of the DBZ effect

An Anonymous recently posted a comment in The Dragon Ball Z effect. What follows is the comment:

Ok, so I wanted to know what people thought of the following thing.
So its obvious that the number of people playing WoW has dropped considerably in the last year or so, and blizzard has made a wide variety of attempts to improve the number of people playing. These attempts include playing for free up to level 20, commercials starring Chuck Norris, getting a free copy of Diablo 3 with a one year subscription to WoW. These are at least the ones that I've seen, and come to mind when I think about an aggressive advertising campaign to improve subscribers. But now there is a new one that I think is worth mentioning.
So the next "upgrade/promotion" I've seen is something called the scroll of resurrection which is when a player gets a super pimped out mount, in return for getting an inactive player (not a new player, but a player who has been inactive since march 4th). The returning player gets the following stuff
7 days of free game time, a optional free character move (to another server), a FREE upgrade to cataclysm (the most recent massive game update), and in my opinion the most interesting thing of all, is a free upgrade to boost a single character to level 80!
I'm curious to know what people think about this, having a character instantly moved to level 80. That seems...pretty crazy.

This is interesting. I had seen the free to 20 promotion. And it is true that WOW has lost a significant portion of its player base recently. The last promotion indicates that Blizzard thinks ex-players is a significant enough market to directly target it. I like the structure of the promotion as odds are good that some current player knows the person, either a real life friend or guildmate. Though I agree that a free level 80 character is very interesting. I think that it signals there is a barrier to entry of some sort. Whether it is new players getting discouraged and quitting or old players not wanting to grind up to max level with an older character or new class they want to try.

In any case this seems like the WOW monolith is starting to collapse under the weight of years of new content and playtime. I wonder if there will be another MMO that becomes such a market force? I doubt that one will given current MMO designs. In particular any game like WOW will suffer a similar fate. As I have indicated before, I think something new is needed for there to be a really enduring MMO.