well, most MMO`s out there are based on fantasy lands with elfes and orcs.
even the games claiming not to be like that, still have a strong feel about them, looking simular to "Tolkien games"
example, Rising Force Online, the Bellato race is almost hobbit like, while that magic race is very Elf like..

Fantasy games just stimulate the minds of people,
and to draw in allot of people, you need to have variable content.
this is best accieved with the "Tolkien" element i guess

You over look games like SWG (Pre SOE betrayal) and City of Villians/Heroes which have classes built around pets yet lack any sort of 'tolken' feel.

Interesting, Nick. Certainly was a point of interest for us at GoPets, which is entirely centered around pet caretaking. Something that has frequently come up with our partners, etc that you might want to consider next time is the correlation or lack thereof between players who have pets in real life and players who have pets in online space. If you have real pets, is it more desirable to have virtual pets, or if you can't have real pets, is it more desirable to have virtual ones? I can see arguments for both sides. What we see in Asia seems to indicate that lack of real life pets drives desires for virtual pets, but even there we don't know the correlation, and the dynamics would be separately interesting in the west.

Typo on page 3, first sentence:

"... players were asked how important it was to them to be able to be able to name their pet."

Should read "... players were asked how important it was to be able to name their pet."

Good stuff as always Nick!