ScottHope:
Could it be that the more detail you put into a character, the more powerful a computer you need to animate it?
Well ya, the higher the poly count and tighter meshes, textures, lighting etc.... Anything you do has some affect on it, but really even with pretty lightweight specs, it would be nothing much. Thing is, there's no real game assets stored on your computer. The installation of the game is like what 300mb or something? 255 on my machine, so the rendering, if there is any, is being done at their end, and they are 'dynamic' characters either, pretty static. The swing animations are like a two-state deals from what I can tell.
But then again, this is much the same game as the old one. Everything is still pushed to your machine so via browser framework so I don't imagine there's much room to play with, which is why there's no animations, terrain movement, environment lighting etc.
Avatars don't have to look killer lifelike, would not take much to polish up the faces and head features, hair. Graphic arts students are all over the place, find a couple, pay them a couple grand and give them some basic parameters and such, probably get some nice stuff back.
There's no reason to have anatomical weirdness going on, not these days also. I'd like to think there's a massive update to the game coming, like a totally polished version being dropped.
;)