| Has it occurred to any of you that Everquest -- and most MMOs -- had insufferably inconvenient mechanics and were entirely too tedious? I'm sorry, but sitting in a group of 6 people beating on one exp mob for two minutes at a time with autoattack in the same spot for five hours isn't exactly what most sane people would consider even approaching fun. It's not a matter of WoW "dumbing down" the game. The designers -- who had a lot of EQ experience -- realized "holy shit, this is boring. Let's make basic gameplay mechanics actually fun."
I'll save you the trouble of calling me a fanboy. I confess. I love WoW. The combat is actually fun. The dungeons are interesting. I actually like doing tradeskills -- something I hated with heroic intensity in EQ. WoW takes a lot of the insufferable tedium out of the genre. | 