Quote Originally Posted by Minister
Perhaps some of the points I'm making are old (I stopped playing EQ1 in 2001), but I clearly remember what I was so impressed with in WoW.

1. No Downtime: even in full 40-man raids in WoW, you will not find yourself waiting for buffs/mana for more than 60 seconds. Many character classes require absolutely no downtime at all while soloing. This is a stark contrast to the pre-35 "spellbook staring meditation" method.

2. Content Availability: they have enough quests to take you all the way to 70 and beyond. And what's even better: the quests guide you to the next zone for you. It's beautiful. Grinding is almost obsolete.

3. Instances: instanced dungeons means never having to race another guild for Trakanon or coordinate Plane of Fear clears.

4. "Ghosts": since you run back to your corpse as a ghost, you never lose gear or loot. Deaths hurt your durability, which is simply a way to remove money from the economy. No more "corpse run gear".

5. Macros and UI Addons: there's an entire community of people, playing the class as you, having the same problem with X, and they have designed a macro script or UI addon to fix it. As long as it doesn't promote botting, they can do it legally, too.

I heartily disagree about max level and items in a short time: level, yes, but endgame items are tough to get.
wow.. i couldnt disagree with each point more.

1: down time encourages efficient use of mana/hp and thus adds more intelligence to gameplay
2: questing is just another form of grinding. PvE is PvE.
3: instances ruin PvP
4: again, "PvP" immunity to retrieve your corpse, and no death penalties is horrible
5: macros are fine.. WoW macros have a lot less impact than some games have had (ie, /tar in shadowbane, /face in daoc, etc).

then again, i suppose most of those points are valid if you play for PvE. i play games to PvP. the grind between starting a game and getting to the point where i can kill people is an unfotunate necessity.