Why do you like WoW?

[Professor Frink]

I am definitely not a min/max gamer and there are some decent flashes of immersion (the spiders in the undead areas and in Duskwood give me the willies every time I see them so of course I feel compelled to kill all of them I see), and there are some areas with wonderful ambience (love Mulgore, Tirisfal Glades, and Dun Morogh/Loch Modan), but overall (ignoring the PvP aspect) WoW is still extremely linear.  You have no input into the world; you just follow what the devs have set out as the story.  Yay!  I defeated the groups of centaurs thretening the barrens and killed the Warlord.  Oh, wait, they're back 5 seconds later because someone else is doing the exact same quest now.
[right][snapback]65835[/snapback][/right]

The way respawning works bothers me, and if I stop playing the game soon that will probably be why. The last MMORPG I played was a CircleMUD, and at the risk of being crotchety-old-man-guy, respawning worked much better back then: well designed zones either did "zone resets" where the entire area went back to its starting state when the main quest was completed or nobody was in it (low-population areas did this) or there were "patrols" where mobs spawned somewhere empty and then ran a circuit where they lived (high-population areas did that, you wouldn't want to zone-reset the starter town). Many mobs in WoW seem decidedly non-mobile and fading into existence next to where you're sitting because you took too long to slog through the strangely seeded field of barely moving mobs seems cheap and anti-fun.

I'd like it if there were some way for players to change the world, but I can live with the idea that that's technically impractical and one of the fundamental differences between an RPG and a MUD/MMORPG. When games made 10 years ago that inspired the entire genre did things in an obviously better way that would still work just fine, it irks me.

-- frink