I supose many people might dislike it. Heck I've known some players who were looking for grind so they left for WoW
Still for me nothing beats the nice team coordinations you can have on GW. Good players win there, not kids without a life
God forbid, they got their grind fix in WoW.
Grinding in WoW is not that big issue. You have tons of quests to accomplish, you just need to travel a lot. If you run out of quests before a level up, you can go to another place with monsters of the same level range, and continue playing there.
You don't know the meaning of
grinding until you start playing Silkroad Online and reach, let's say, level 30. Without a bot or powerleveling! Trust me. WoW is amazingly dynamic and fun after nearly two years wasted grinding in Silkroad.
And here are some notes to those who think playing WoW means the end of world:
Only the extreme cases of addiction are mentioned, and they are mentioned because WoW is played by
so many people that statistically, it is impossible that some out of millions suffers from an extreme case of game addiction. And why is it that we hear about these stories? Because it is no big deal if someone has, let's say, three level 70 characters in WoW, and has all what one needs in real life - a girlfriend/wife, a well-paying work, etc. No one hears about these people, because the media - tabloid papers or news agencies - cannot write about them because "they do nothing special" and they can only sell what is "special."
I have not read too many articles discussing WoW from this perspective, but those I read elevated the effects of addiction and generalized very much, saying that everyone playing WoW will end up with this and that illness/disorder/social problems etc. The kind of thing you are doing. Another reason we read/hear about WoW addiction stories is simply because WoW is by far the most known and widely played MMORPGs. Do you think that there are fewer addicted players to let's say, Silkroad Online than to WoW (in proportions)? I used to play SRO and play a bit of WoW nowadays, and I saw more addicts on SRO than I do on WoW. Silkroad is not mentioned anywhere because it is by far less known.
By this, I would like to suggest the biasedness (<-- is this a word?) of the media and Blizzard's popularity. If you are journalist who despises online gaming, you would rather talk about game addicts, not new developments in industrial technologies. There you go. I don't think why people generalize so badly based on some (even if extreme) cases. It is as much saying as seeing a drunkard on the streets means that if anyone drinks a glass of beer will become a drunkard. I know that this beer-WoW comparison is not the best, but the point is that people sometimes generalize based on one or two cases *despite* common sense.
I don't know if you have ever wondered if anyone lost his job/wife/car/house because of addiction to FreeSpace. It is not talked about because FS is by far less common than WoW.
Let's assume we have two serious game addicts. The first guy is an addict of WoW. The second is an addict of FreeSpace. They both spend 48 hours in front of their monitors, playing their favorite games. In the 49th hour, they fall out of their chair and die. In the first case, we have an article that sums up like this: "A serious game addict died again while playing a game. And guess what, it was World of Warcraft!" The FreeSpace guy, however, is more likely to get this: "Game addiction has once again killed someone." FreeSpace is just "some kind of space simulator game," so it will never get mentioned by title, *if* it ever gets reported.