More first impressions

[FoxBat]

My biggest argh factor from my limited playing so far has probably been the time  I had to spend running between places. It would seem to me I spent about 50% of total time running between places. I suppose it gets better once you can buy a horse; and as you discover griffon routes it gets easier as well, but still its an lot of time.

I'm with you on this one, and it's especially bad for the night elves. There's that one uber-fedex quest where you have to collect water from every place on this island and return to the same darn guy. Darnassus is a beautiful city but it's still boring running around everywhere. And while the 1-minute "gee-wow" factor the first time you hop a hippogryph ride is incredible, you do absoutely nothing while flying; imagine doing that 50 or so times and we can see the problem. That the two continents are currently linked with a teleporter rather than a boat is a godsend of a feature if you ask me.

WoW really doesen't have so much of a "killing rats" problem fortunately, as you can hit level 5 pretty fast and get to do some good travelling instead of hanging in the same spot all the time. So far the player skills, spells, and abilities etc. seem fairly well thought out. I think the main MMOG flaw WoW retains is the obscene travel time. Hopefully there are more travel opportunites later, but there is really no good reason why newbies shouldn't have access to teleporters or waypoints, or a feature like clicking on a direction post makes your character automatically follow the main road towards that location, and you can socialize in the meantime. Simply making characters run faster would help.

Despite what Bolty said earlier, there death penalty can be huge. It's called spending two or three minutes to get back to your corpse. <_<

I did notice some "Portal Trainer" sitting in the Darnassus Temple Garden, but I couldn't talk to her. I would probably kill someone and/or have their baby if it means I could learn some long distance teleport spell.