Polish and fun are not an either/or type of thing. We should have both, not one or the other.
Polish does not equate to fun, but fun can be a by product. You speak about these as though it where some civil right we are entitled too. Polish is a subjective term; it is fairly hard to determine if a game is polished enough. Being a paying customer we have expectations, and in my own experience these expectations only pay off half the time. If a choice is necessary, I would prefer fun over polish any day. WoW is supposed to be polish, but for me its not fun.
Polish and fun are not an either/or type of thing. We should have both, not one or the other.
Well the day people stop drawing lines on what should or shouldn't be included in games and realize that EVERYTHING should be included in a game is the day we will no longer have threads like this.
I seen the argument thrown around many times on this site, that New MMORPGs suffer from a lack of Polish, because of their early release, and that we cant expect game polish like WoW, because they had 6 years of perfection time to polish.
Well if thats the case, how come older MMORPG then WoW, arent MORE POLISH than WoW?
PS: Your MMORPG was Exposed
WoW is made by Blizzard. Blizzard makes extremely good video games.
Don't know if I would call WoW 'good' but its definitely polished.
To me - polish does not have much to do with bug fixes at all. A game can have flaws and still be polished. WoW was polished the day it was released - even though it had quite a few server issues. Can't really blame them for that though - no one expected the number of people that would be playing when comparing against other American MMOs.
Polish is the overall appearance of a game. Like a feeling you get when you play the game. It just feels polished or it doesn't. The reason for this is the amount of time that different departments spent on the game itself.
One of my biggest gripes about a lot of the "sandbox" style MMOs are the character and mob animations. They skip, jitter, have un-natural movements, movements aren't in sync with the world around them, etc. With WoW, this is what impressed me the most at first glance. The smoothness of watching a player run by reminded me of an action game at the time instead of an MMO. Seeing tigers walk past that didn't look like they belonged in a gumby claymation video. The flying griffons were amazing when compared to EQ2 flight. The wings would stretch and bend like wings of a bird instead of a plastic model.
Sound also usually plays an important part. I would love to see sound held to a higher standard in PvP MMOs. In FPS games, you will often listen for footsteps or mortar fire. In MMOs, you can't really tell the direction they are coming from in most games. Also, I think that the warcraft music score really adds to the game.
Then you have all the little things. I played DAoC for years. Great game. Also, played UO before that. Played a few other MMOs off an on pre-WoW era. The WoW comes out. I walked through stormwind and notice the little things that I could do in WoW that I could not do in other games. For the first time since UO, I could choose where to sit. When eating and drinking you see food or a cup in my hand. Vocal emotes. NPCs that walk around the city that don't really even have a purpose other to add ambiance. Some of the NPCs even had conversations. When walking up to Markus at the gates of Stormwind, I decided to salute him one day. I laughed my ass off when he saluted back.
To me .. that is polish. It's the way the entire game comes together. All games are going to have bugs. Some bugs take longer than others to be fixed. Keep one thing in mind though - some people are calling game changing decisions as bugs these days. Currently, I mostly play Eve and most of the whining about bugs are actually not bugs at all. Simply they don't like the changes that went into the game and they feel that it breaks their game play. Even if you fix all of the bugs inside a lot of the MMOs out there - they won't be polished.
MMOs are really hard to program and you add stuff to it all the time. Only a few programmers in the world can make a truly polished MMO.
Wow is not the game with best polish however, Guildwars is even better there. A few years ago I spent 2 years playing it and never saw even a single bug or problem.
Blizzard was extremly lucky to have 2 of the best people in the world as head developers for Wow, first Strain (who made GW after) and then Kaplan. There are a lot of Wow players that are saying that the polish have gone down after Kaplan was moved, but adding stuff doesn't require as much skill as creating the game until it launches.
Blizzard also have money but GW proves that it is skill first and not money that gives you a polished game, even if many games are released too early due to economical problems and therefor are in bad shape.
EQ cost 8 million dollars while Wow spent ten times as much at release but that is not the true issue here.
Few companies have people who can pull a truly polished MMO off, Blizzard, Arenanet and probably Bioware. That is the reason I think one of those 3 will make the next big game (my main guess is actually ANet but it is always hard to guess). Companies like CCP have many competent people but the misses people like Kaplan (Blizzard) Strain (now making a zombie MMO), O'Brien (ANet) and Ray (Bioware). There are jut a few people like that around.
That doesn't mean others can't make great games but the polish won't be that good without someone like that.
MMOs are really hard to program and you add stuff to it all the time. Only a few programmers in the world can make a truly polished MMO.
Wow is not the game with best polish however, Guildwars is even better there. A few years ago I spent 2 years playing it and never saw even a single bug or problem.
Blizzard was extremly lucky to have 2 of the best people in the world as head developers for Wow, first Strain (who made GW after) and then Kaplan. There are a lot of Wow players that are saying that the polish have gone down after Kaplan was moved, but adding stuff doesn't require as much skill as creating the game until it launches.
Blizzard also have money but GW proves that it is skill first and not money that gives you a polished game, even if many games are released too early due to economical problems and therefor are in bad shape.
EQ cost 8 million dollars while Wow spent ten times as much at release but that is not the true issue here.
Few companies have people who can pull a truly polished MMO off, Blizzard, Arenanet and probably Bioware. That is the reason I think one of those 3 will make the next big game (my main guess is actually ANet but it is always hard to guess). Companies like CCP have many competent people but the misses people like Kaplan (Blizzard) Strain (now making a zombie MMO), O'Brien (ANet) and Ray (Bioware). There are jut a few people like that around.
That doesn't mean others can't make great games but the polish won't be that good without someone like that.
I hear people referring to developers as programmers. MMO or not, most of the developers are not programmers. They don't even know much about how programming works either.
The artists that work on the object modeling or texture mapping are not programmers. Neither are the animators, motion capture technicians, plethora of consultants hired to study the movements of specific animal breeds.
The sounds technicians, the musicians, conductors and gaffers don't offer much in the way of code either.
The novelists, storyboard writers and concept sketch artists sure aren't.
Not to mention competent project managers and producers.
My point? The game itself doesn't require a huge amount of programmers. In fact the games usually require only two or three teams of programmers (Internal tools, Server development and Client Development). Most of the other departments have more to do with the content of the game. Blizzard and these other companies that want to release quality, polished games have the ability to hire quality people specific to the needs of the game itself. A lot of the older and more independent games were created by small studios that were bought up by larger companies (if they were lucky). They usually had barely enough programmers to create and maintain the game engine and a severely understaffed art department. Sound was often done as an after thought and usually are not handled by professionals. The writing too is often hodge-podge.
Overall design, development, streamlining, interface and upkeep (and a few dozen more factors) are all elements that contribute to a "polished game". For instance a game without "jumping" is a clear example of seriously lack in combat polish, if your main competitor is offering it. The same goes for extra features if they would hamper fun gameplay.
As Wow on mmorpg.com is a bad word and because the game owns the complete market, the best thing to do is install the brand new SC2 and look at it from a new players way.
I was amazed (don't even like RTS) and blown away by the Blizzard touch.
The answer to your question OP is one word: Blizzard.
Since MMORPG's are by far the most difficult games to design, develop, streamline, program and maintain, the difference with other MMo's was and still is overwhelming.
It is called corporate identity and has nothing to do with individual talent (since SC2 had a complete different team than SC1 or WoW).
Quite frankly, the answer to your question lies within the question. WoW very quickly rose far and above what any other MMO had even come close to doing in terms of attracting players. During that time, other games began seeing their subscription base drop, and went down one of two avenues. They either throttled back on spending to accomodate the loss of players, or invested money in changing their games to be more like WoW.
The games that pulled back never really "polished" things like graphics, or added in-depth new content or gameplay systems, they simply continued what they had been doing on a smaller scale. This was the safe business decision. Keep the players you still have happy, roll with the punches, and ensure that your game remains profitable for as long as possible.
Other games decided to gamble and start changing their games to be competitive with WoW. No game that went this route has been more famous (infamous) for doing so than Star Wars Galaxies. After losing a significant amount of subs after WoW launched, SOE and LucasArts cobbled together a plan to make SWG more like WoW. Since it's launch in '03, SWG had never been the success that both companies had invisioned. Blizzard found a formula that obviously drew in the player masses, which got SOE and LA hungry to achieve the same success.
It started with the combat upgrade, which is now seen as kind of a filler to transition players from the original version of the game (Pre-CU) to their final vision of transforming the game into the more WoW-esque game that they believed would make it competitive (the NGE). SOE rushed through the coding of the NGE in, according to a dev that worked on the NGE, about 2 months. The rest is history. The NGE was a bug-filled, half finished mess that drove off it's current playerbase and never attracted many new players due to the horrible implementation of the NGE, and the even worse press it recieved.
The NGE became the hard lesson to most companies not to try to radically change their games midstream. Most companies from that point on started developing new games to compete with WoW instead, and used the revenue from the older games to finance the new projects. Most of the older games were then heavily limited on what would be invested on them in terms of both money and manpower.
In the meantime, with players growing tired of their older games, and the slowdown those games had in terms of new content, more and more players made their way over to WoW. With the huge revenue stream Blizzard was seeing, it was pretty easy for them to pump out massive expansions full of new content to keep their now-juggernaut game at the top of the MMO heap.
This is why the older games are "less polished" than WoW. Most of those older games have now been all but abandoned by their companies in favor of the next generation of MMO's. WoW is still #1 by a mile in subscribers, still being strongly supported, and will still be standing long after those older games are shut down and their servers have been scrapped.
It really is sad when you look at many of those older games that were and are good, but will never see their full potential.
players do not seem to want polish, they want new content. players are content consuming machines.
which of the following hypothetical announcements would attract more new customers?
"we are happy to announce that we have revisited all the text in our maps, quests and items databases and have corrected over 500 spelling and grammatical errors. we have also greatly expanded information on player races and classes and updated the art design of the GUI."
"we are happy to announce that we have added 100 new quests across all levels and over 500 new items to the game. we have also added an additonal raid dungeon for characters at the level cap."
I seen the argument thrown around many times on this site, that New MMORPGs suffer from a lack of Polish, because of their early release, and that we cant expect game polish like WoW, because they had 6 years of perfection time to polish.
Well if thats the case, how come older MMORPG then WoW, arent MORE POLISH than WoW?
Because there aren't many Polish dev companies?
Edit: I don't think there's any Armenian dev companies either. Disgraceful, I tell you.
HAHAHA ... whew.
Good stuff.
Seriously though, blizzard is a fine company. They have maintained a standard for themselves over the years, so much higher than the industry standard that not alot of companies have raised themselves to the challenge. Know one else feels the need to try and compete with blizzards professionalism because no other company is doing that either.
I will say there are a few companies out there now that appear to be bridging the gap. THQ is doing a good job of it, although they farm alot of their games out to outside studios, blizzard does everything internally. Bioware seems to be working hard to put out some quality products too, but I have yet to see a Bioware game that has quite the depth that blizzards games have. SW:TOR will be a big litmus test for BIOWARE in my book. If they get this right (and its looking good) they can perhaps be the first company to match Blizzards production quality in the MMO genre to date.
I will say ... for me I have been a little disappointed with Starcraft 2. I like the game and all but the cinematics seemed a little bit of a step back for blizzard and the game play is so stock and standard for the series and genre that it hardly feels like a new game. Still its fun as hell and very "finished" feeling. I dont think I have noticed a single bug or glitch since I have been playing.
I will say this. There are a number of asian studios that are every bit as good (maybe not as big) as blizzard out there that put out fine games, MMOs and consoles alike, that I am just woefully ignorant of. The world is a big place, and there is real competition for blizz out there, just got to dig around for it.
Sony's really the only culprit for this sort of opinion to be made.
SOE should have sued that Ronco guy over the phrase "SET IT AND FORGET IT!"
Blizzard has stayed on top of their game addressing issues and I think purposely changing things just enough to keep it different. Keeping over 1 million users for 6 years is an impressive feat. Keeping over 4 or 5 or 6 or however many that's came and gone just attests to the constant attention that's made on the game.
SWG got one big over haul, and it sucked.
EQ 1 and EQ 2 get little attention until the next 'buy our box' expansion comes along.
Vanguard has like 1 person working on it whenever he feels like it now. (That may or maynot be true.)
Polish isn't a one time thing, it takes daily attention for years to address and too many game companies are willing to 'let it set for a month, let it set for a month' and patch a bunch of bells and whistles that people don't really ever get to see. Just for illusion's sake it's worth changing a few things around from time to time just to give people something to complain about.
THIS!!!
Brilliant reply. I'm especially fond of the closing paragraphs opening line...that line should be the motto of EVERY company attempting to develop a game for the MMO market.
Originally posted by MMOExposed I seen the argument thrown around many times on this site, that New MMORPGs suffer from a lack of Polish, because of their early release, and that we cant expect game polish like WoW, because they had 6 years of perfection time to polish. Well if thats the case, how come older MMORPG then WoW, arent MORE POLISH than WoW?
PS: Your MMORPG was Exposed
Because WoW has Mieczyslaw Gryzbowski. There's no one more Polish than he is.
If you can define it that simply i bet you could find a game with better than wow's polish. It just a term that kinda means plays well and anit bother some. Well according to who? Polish is a personal evaluation.
The real thign i think gets in the way is movement. Movement is often part of peoples feeling of the game. If movement is jerky or slow, or just feels wrong they are going to have negitive feelings about the game. Wow has very good and fluid movement. Same goes for how quickly abilities activate. The ui , etc can all be easily fix/polished. But your movement and combat systems not so much. So why is wow so polished ... becuase it has solid movement and combat systems that feel responsive to the player.
The polish thign is funny, but thats is how you correctly spell it.
"Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one ..." - Thomas Paine
To me - polish does not have much to do with bug fixes at all. A game can have flaws and still be polished. WoW was polished the day it was released - even though it had quite a few server issues. Can't really blame them for that though - no one expected the number of people that would be playing when comparing against other American MMOs.
Then you have all the little things. I played DAoC for years. Great game. Also, played UO before that. Played a few other MMOs off an on pre-WoW era. The WoW comes out. I walked through stormwind and notice the little things that I could do in WoW that I could not do in other games. For the first time since UO, I could choose where to sit. When eating and drinking you see food or a cup in my hand. Vocal emotes. NPCs that walk around the city that don't really even have a purpose other to add ambiance. Some of the NPCs even had conversations. When walking up to Markus at the gates of Stormwind, I decided to salute him one day. I laughed my ass off when he saluted back.
I think this is the best description of polish. Its the little things in the game that you notice that they took the time to put in like Marcus will salute you back if you salute him. The comments you get from talking to goblins at the different zepplin towers. There are a lot of little things that WoW had from day one that other devs do not put in or ignore for some reason and that detracts from the overall experience of the game. To me polish is all the little things (its also a pretty tasty sausage) that you may tend to ignore after a while but initially they grab you and make you wonder what else is in store. I cant tell you how it made me laugh a little the first time i looted a "Broken I Win Button" off a mob. Or some of the comments that are on weapons and armor, its these small things that make a game polished.
Comments
Polish and fun are not an either/or type of thing. We should have both, not one or the other.
Polish does not equate to fun, but fun can be a by product. You speak about these as though it where some civil right we are entitled too. Polish is a subjective term; it is fairly hard to determine if a game is polished enough. Being a paying customer we have expectations, and in my own experience these expectations only pay off half the time. If a choice is necessary, I would prefer fun over polish any day. WoW is supposed to be polish, but for me its not fun.
Well the day people stop drawing lines on what should or shouldn't be included in games and realize that EVERYTHING should be included in a game is the day we will no longer have threads like this.
Don't know if I would call WoW 'good' but its definitely polished.
To me - polish does not have much to do with bug fixes at all. A game can have flaws and still be polished. WoW was polished the day it was released - even though it had quite a few server issues. Can't really blame them for that though - no one expected the number of people that would be playing when comparing against other American MMOs.
Polish is the overall appearance of a game. Like a feeling you get when you play the game. It just feels polished or it doesn't. The reason for this is the amount of time that different departments spent on the game itself.
One of my biggest gripes about a lot of the "sandbox" style MMOs are the character and mob animations. They skip, jitter, have un-natural movements, movements aren't in sync with the world around them, etc. With WoW, this is what impressed me the most at first glance. The smoothness of watching a player run by reminded me of an action game at the time instead of an MMO. Seeing tigers walk past that didn't look like they belonged in a gumby claymation video. The flying griffons were amazing when compared to EQ2 flight. The wings would stretch and bend like wings of a bird instead of a plastic model.
Sound also usually plays an important part. I would love to see sound held to a higher standard in PvP MMOs. In FPS games, you will often listen for footsteps or mortar fire. In MMOs, you can't really tell the direction they are coming from in most games. Also, I think that the warcraft music score really adds to the game.
Then you have all the little things. I played DAoC for years. Great game. Also, played UO before that. Played a few other MMOs off an on pre-WoW era. The WoW comes out. I walked through stormwind and notice the little things that I could do in WoW that I could not do in other games. For the first time since UO, I could choose where to sit. When eating and drinking you see food or a cup in my hand. Vocal emotes. NPCs that walk around the city that don't really even have a purpose other to add ambiance. Some of the NPCs even had conversations. When walking up to Markus at the gates of Stormwind, I decided to salute him one day. I laughed my ass off when he saluted back.
To me .. that is polish. It's the way the entire game comes together. All games are going to have bugs. Some bugs take longer than others to be fixed. Keep one thing in mind though - some people are calling game changing decisions as bugs these days. Currently, I mostly play Eve and most of the whining about bugs are actually not bugs at all. Simply they don't like the changes that went into the game and they feel that it breaks their game play. Even if you fix all of the bugs inside a lot of the MMOs out there - they won't be polished.
MMOs are really hard to program and you add stuff to it all the time. Only a few programmers in the world can make a truly polished MMO.
Wow is not the game with best polish however, Guildwars is even better there. A few years ago I spent 2 years playing it and never saw even a single bug or problem.
Blizzard was extremly lucky to have 2 of the best people in the world as head developers for Wow, first Strain (who made GW after) and then Kaplan. There are a lot of Wow players that are saying that the polish have gone down after Kaplan was moved, but adding stuff doesn't require as much skill as creating the game until it launches.
Blizzard also have money but GW proves that it is skill first and not money that gives you a polished game, even if many games are released too early due to economical problems and therefor are in bad shape.
EQ cost 8 million dollars while Wow spent ten times as much at release but that is not the true issue here.
Few companies have people who can pull a truly polished MMO off, Blizzard, Arenanet and probably Bioware. That is the reason I think one of those 3 will make the next big game (my main guess is actually ANet but it is always hard to guess). Companies like CCP have many competent people but the misses people like Kaplan (Blizzard) Strain (now making a zombie MMO), O'Brien (ANet) and Ray (Bioware). There are jut a few people like that around.
That doesn't mean others can't make great games but the polish won't be that good without someone like that.
I hear people referring to developers as programmers. MMO or not, most of the developers are not programmers. They don't even know much about how programming works either.
The artists that work on the object modeling or texture mapping are not programmers. Neither are the animators, motion capture technicians, plethora of consultants hired to study the movements of specific animal breeds.
The sounds technicians, the musicians, conductors and gaffers don't offer much in the way of code either.
The novelists, storyboard writers and concept sketch artists sure aren't.
Not to mention competent project managers and producers.
My point? The game itself doesn't require a huge amount of programmers. In fact the games usually require only two or three teams of programmers (Internal tools, Server development and Client Development). Most of the other departments have more to do with the content of the game. Blizzard and these other companies that want to release quality, polished games have the ability to hire quality people specific to the needs of the game itself. A lot of the older and more independent games were created by small studios that were bought up by larger companies (if they were lucky). They usually had barely enough programmers to create and maintain the game engine and a severely understaffed art department. Sound was often done as an after thought and usually are not handled by professionals. The writing too is often hodge-podge.
Polish is more than making bug free games.
Overall design, development, streamlining, interface and upkeep (and a few dozen more factors) are all elements that contribute to a "polished game". For instance a game without "jumping" is a clear example of seriously lack in combat polish, if your main competitor is offering it. The same goes for extra features if they would hamper fun gameplay.
As Wow on mmorpg.com is a bad word and because the game owns the complete market, the best thing to do is install the brand new SC2 and look at it from a new players way.
I was amazed (don't even like RTS) and blown away by the Blizzard touch.
The answer to your question OP is one word: Blizzard.
Since MMORPG's are by far the most difficult games to design, develop, streamline, program and maintain, the difference with other MMo's was and still is overwhelming.
It is called corporate identity and has nothing to do with individual talent (since SC2 had a complete different team than SC1 or WoW).
Quite frankly, the answer to your question lies within the question. WoW very quickly rose far and above what any other MMO had even come close to doing in terms of attracting players. During that time, other games began seeing their subscription base drop, and went down one of two avenues. They either throttled back on spending to accomodate the loss of players, or invested money in changing their games to be more like WoW.
The games that pulled back never really "polished" things like graphics, or added in-depth new content or gameplay systems, they simply continued what they had been doing on a smaller scale. This was the safe business decision. Keep the players you still have happy, roll with the punches, and ensure that your game remains profitable for as long as possible.
Other games decided to gamble and start changing their games to be competitive with WoW. No game that went this route has been more famous (infamous) for doing so than Star Wars Galaxies. After losing a significant amount of subs after WoW launched, SOE and LucasArts cobbled together a plan to make SWG more like WoW. Since it's launch in '03, SWG had never been the success that both companies had invisioned. Blizzard found a formula that obviously drew in the player masses, which got SOE and LA hungry to achieve the same success.
It started with the combat upgrade, which is now seen as kind of a filler to transition players from the original version of the game (Pre-CU) to their final vision of transforming the game into the more WoW-esque game that they believed would make it competitive (the NGE). SOE rushed through the coding of the NGE in, according to a dev that worked on the NGE, about 2 months. The rest is history. The NGE was a bug-filled, half finished mess that drove off it's current playerbase and never attracted many new players due to the horrible implementation of the NGE, and the even worse press it recieved.
The NGE became the hard lesson to most companies not to try to radically change their games midstream. Most companies from that point on started developing new games to compete with WoW instead, and used the revenue from the older games to finance the new projects. Most of the older games were then heavily limited on what would be invested on them in terms of both money and manpower.
In the meantime, with players growing tired of their older games, and the slowdown those games had in terms of new content, more and more players made their way over to WoW. With the huge revenue stream Blizzard was seeing, it was pretty easy for them to pump out massive expansions full of new content to keep their now-juggernaut game at the top of the MMO heap.
This is why the older games are "less polished" than WoW. Most of those older games have now been all but abandoned by their companies in favor of the next generation of MMO's. WoW is still #1 by a mile in subscribers, still being strongly supported, and will still be standing long after those older games are shut down and their servers have been scrapped.
It really is sad when you look at many of those older games that were and are good, but will never see their full potential.
players do not seem to want polish, they want new content. players are content consuming machines.
which of the following hypothetical announcements would attract more new customers?
"we are happy to announce that we have revisited all the text in our maps, quests and items databases and have corrected over 500 spelling and grammatical errors. we have also greatly expanded information on player races and classes and updated the art design of the GUI."
"we are happy to announce that we have added 100 new quests across all levels and over 500 new items to the game. we have also added an additonal raid dungeon for characters at the level cap."
HAHAHA ... whew.
Good stuff.
Seriously though, blizzard is a fine company. They have maintained a standard for themselves over the years, so much higher than the industry standard that not alot of companies have raised themselves to the challenge. Know one else feels the need to try and compete with blizzards professionalism because no other company is doing that either.
I will say there are a few companies out there now that appear to be bridging the gap. THQ is doing a good job of it, although they farm alot of their games out to outside studios, blizzard does everything internally. Bioware seems to be working hard to put out some quality products too, but I have yet to see a Bioware game that has quite the depth that blizzards games have. SW:TOR will be a big litmus test for BIOWARE in my book. If they get this right (and its looking good) they can perhaps be the first company to match Blizzards production quality in the MMO genre to date.
I will say ... for me I have been a little disappointed with Starcraft 2. I like the game and all but the cinematics seemed a little bit of a step back for blizzard and the game play is so stock and standard for the series and genre that it hardly feels like a new game. Still its fun as hell and very "finished" feeling. I dont think I have noticed a single bug or glitch since I have been playing.
I will say this. There are a number of asian studios that are every bit as good (maybe not as big) as blizzard out there that put out fine games, MMOs and consoles alike, that I am just woefully ignorant of. The world is a big place, and there is real competition for blizz out there, just got to dig around for it.
THIS!!!
Brilliant reply. I'm especially fond of the closing paragraphs opening line...that line should be the motto of EVERY company attempting to develop a game for the MMO market.
Because WoW has Mieczyslaw Gryzbowski. There's no one more Polish than he is.
imo the OP havent been mocked enough yet.....
Polish....sigh
Answer me this ... what is polish ?
If you can define it that simply i bet you could find a game with better than wow's polish. It just a term that kinda means plays well and anit bother some. Well according to who? Polish is a personal evaluation.
The real thign i think gets in the way is movement. Movement is often part of peoples feeling of the game. If movement is jerky or slow, or just feels wrong they are going to have negitive feelings about the game. Wow has very good and fluid movement. Same goes for how quickly abilities activate. The ui , etc can all be easily fix/polished. But your movement and combat systems not so much. So why is wow so polished ... becuase it has solid movement and combat systems that feel responsive to the player.
The polish thign is funny, but thats is how you correctly spell it.
"Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one ..." - Thomas Paine
I think this is the best description of polish. Its the little things in the game that you notice that they took the time to put in like Marcus will salute you back if you salute him. The comments you get from talking to goblins at the different zepplin towers. There are a lot of little things that WoW had from day one that other devs do not put in or ignore for some reason and that detracts from the overall experience of the game. To me polish is all the little things (its also a pretty tasty sausage) that you may tend to ignore after a while but initially they grab you and make you wonder what else is in store. I cant tell you how it made me laugh a little the first time i looted a "Broken I Win Button" off a mob. Or some of the comments that are on weapons and armor, its these small things that make a game polished.