Well, I also went ahead and gave WWIIOL a try...and somehow, maybe it's my masochistic streak, but I like it. Sort of.
Raub, your experiences matched mine except I never had the balls to actually take out a tank--each base only spawns a limited number of vehicles, so I didn't want to deny a decent player a useful item. I ran around as a rifleman most of the time, and died to stuff I never saw--y'know, you never do hear the one that gets you.
Where the game turned around for me was when I stumbled into a squad doing an op and they invited me along. Squads seem even more essential in WWIIOL than in AH. Lone-wolfing it, especially as a crunchy, is suicide. So next thing I knew I was riding along in the back of a Bedford with these guys, doing an infantry infiltration of a German-held town. It was pretty neat, and they were quite tolerant of the fact that I was, and still am, the worst infantryman in the BEF.
The best thing to do seems to be to listen to the radio for a bit and try and figure out where the fights are happening--then go to the mission list and pick a defense mission in that area. I got some on-the-job practice defending firebases. Also, to get rank, you can take defense missions (or bomber missions for the air forces), keep your head down for 10+ minutes, then exit, and you'll get promotion points. The higher the rank, the better the stuff you can use. Infantry and bomber defense missions don't require a kill--you can just spawn, sit there, and exit and get points toward the next rank. Cheesy, but people do it.
There's a lot of stuff still screwy about the game, but they've made some major improvements since I was in the beta. The netcode is still nowhere near as good as AH's, there's still some pretty egregious bugs like clipping, and flying's just ridiculous. (My one flight was in a Hurricane--I was getting 11 fps over a furball, with frequent pauses, then had a Ju 87 climb up and kill me with 4 or 5 pings, one of which must've been a 7.7mm right to the head. Chhhhyeah, riiiiiight.) But the ground war is pretty neat stuff, the gameplay's not *too* bad if you go in with the right expectations.
Some are fanbois, some are playa hatas. The truth, as always, lies somewhere in the middle.
