I think this will be an issue for those not used to guild led content. While in WoW guilds are important, they are not central to the game outside of the few percent doing hardcore raiding. This leads to a lot of general chatter. In WAR, besides PvP, it's all about guilds - so sadly, there seems to be little general chatter as people socialise and do things within their guilds. I help run a guild of 50+ now and so there's lots of guild chatter, party chatter + guildies on ventro. So for me, it feels very social. For someone outside of a guild (or dare I say it, in a poor guild) solo questing and solo PQ'ing will become incredibly dull and lonely. WAR isn't a solo experience, even PvP is balanced around group mechanics.
Although thats not overly surprising, Daoc was all about the guilds too. Indeed it could be said that anything which is RvR based rather than PvP based will be more about the guilds than the non-guilded.
The issue with Quests...well its just a non-issue for me, mainly for 2 reasons. I really dont enjoy PvE in any game, even PvE orientated games who do it well like WoW. It really really just doesnt interest me at all, and I get bored of killing AI mobs in any MMO in about 1 day (whether its plain AI , or supposedly (pfft) advanced AI). Its all about the large scale RvR for me (not instanced crap just to clarify that). Secondly, the reason why the quest issue is a non-issue for me, is because I grew on UO (greatest of all MMOs in its prime imo), and in UO there were no quests at all, so coming from that kind of background you can see why quests just arent an issue for me.
Now if anyone checks my history, they will see that what I've said all along about WAR is that it wont be for everyone. Some will absolutely love it (quite a lot of folks by the looks of it) , some will absolutely hate it , thats just the way things go, everyone has different tastes and different wants in an MMO. For me WAR delivers my tastes and wants, at least more so than any other current MMO. It wont for everyone though, for example Drunkenmaster, it seems very clear to me that WAR simply isnt the right MMO for you. Thats not a bad thing, its just not something which fits you, as I say it wont fit everyone. The important thing for the MMO market is to have lots of different styles of MMO rather than just the same style repeated or someone trying to do all styles in one, thats imo why we need stuff like WW2 online, EvE, EQ2, WoW, Lotro, CoH/V and WAR, that way everyone should be able to find the 1 MMO which fits them.
Currently I put WAR as my 2nd favourite MMO to date (UO, WAR, Daoc, WoW being the top 4 for me), at this stage I can easily see WAR being the #2 western MMO (WoW being #1) in terms of subscriber numbers. I lasted 5 years in UO, 3 in Daoc and roughly 3 in WoW. At the moment I am estimating playing WAR for around 3 years, and then that will be it for MMOs and me, in all likelihood I wont do an MMO again after WAR...that will be nearly 15 years of playing MMOs at that stage, and I think thats quite enough time to be spending on it.
