The fun in WoW is working with a team to achieve a goal. Raids were a lot of fun.
Aces High is a pure meritocracy. If you get into the same plane as someone else, the only thing distinguishing the two of you at that point is skill.
WoW is a blend - it's a meritocracy and a geritocracy. Clearly those who've played for awhile have an advantage gear-wise, but Blizzard makes the previous raid tier's gear available easily for casuals/slackers. Thus there's never a massive gaping discrepancy in gear between the best-geared and the worst-geared. The thing that's overlooked though is that WoW is a game that requires quite a bit of know-how (in terms of proper specs, gear usage, swapping out gear and specs for certain fights) and skill in execution. I've seen two players in exactly the same gear do dramatically different amounts of damage; only skill accounts for that difference.
A lot of people speaking from ignorance in this thread. The person I quoted above though gets things right.
My time in WoW was preceded by 5 years in EQ1. Then 5 years of WoW, and now I've quit. Not because I really wanted to quit, but because I knew it would interfere with my return to school. In WoW I raided the end game, didn't raid at all and just did PvP, played on an RP server, a PvP server, and an RP-PvP server, all at various times in those five years. Its not and never was a perfect game, at times it had more serious flaws then at other times, but it was fun while I played it. It is casual friendly for sure. Over time the trend has been to make things more and more casual friendly, and its a proven formula because every time they made things easier, they got more and more subscribers. But making things casual friendly doesn't appeal to everyone, certainly not the EQ1 player in me.
It is absolutely not true that WoW doesn't take skill. Refer to the quote above. Yes casuals can succeed without putting in "Grizz-like" effort or skills, but Blizzard always keep ways for the best of the best to distinguish themselves, and over time they've done a better job of doing that. The Bliz devs do a pretty good job of reviewing what they did right and wrong each expansion and make adjustments for the next expansion. I'm very critical of some of the moves they've made, and they are certainly bad at making timely releases of new content (especially for the resources they have at their disposal). But they do learn and adjust.
The PvP in WoW is a lot different than Aces High. The concept of "gearing up" is non-existent in AH other than collecting perks. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with it though. I like building a character up in RP type games like WoW. Considering the sheer number of other games that utilize this mechanic, I'm not alone in that.
I like Aces High for being able to log on for two hours randomly and not being behind the curve compared to everyone else. They are different games. If I was the type of personality that could play a game like WoW casually, I'd still be subscribed to it. But I'm not, if I'm going to do WoW, I'm going to do it 100%. Or not at all. Therefore I keep my AH sub, and not my WoW sub while I'm back in school. After I graduate I may well go back to it or a game like it.
One thing I'll disagree about is leveling in WoW. Its very very easy. Any old-school EQ1 player should agree. They keep putting new and faster ways to get to max level fast if you want to. If you want to have all the best in the game with even less work than WoW requires to get to max level, they just get in a Spit16 in Aces High and forget about WoW, its not for you.
Btw, here's my YouTube channel where I have posted many WoW videos from back when I played. Warning, some of them are sarcastic, some show behavior that you wouldn't see (other than in the O'Club or 200) in Aces High. I was writing for a different audience, you might say. On the other hand, some show the game at its very best, such as the Ashenvale series (which was a scenario very similar to something Brooke would have thought up):
http://www.youtube.com/user/JagwarVenCo .
