I just wanted to reply to the OP directly, and didn’t stand to read much of the flame-war following it. So I’m not going into that matter. First of all, it’s quite obvious (aka hit into the face with a big club that has EQ written on it) that you are a huge Everquest fan that would like to have every game being a Everquest-clone, only better. I respect that, while I can’t understand it, but I respect that. You won’t get that much love from the big mass though if you start the flamewar yourself with using terms like “MMORPGs noobs that will try to set me straight”, thereby saying “I’m right by default because whoever objects is a noob”. I simply hope that was not your intention, since if it was you won’t even read this, bathing in superiority. Anyway. First of all, Everquest is more than 10 Years old. I think it’s as likely they’ll use it as a baseline than they will use UO. I guess sometimes it’s time to let go. The reasons you stated for WoW being popular are like the reasons old Super-8 fans state for why Video is popular but crap. But it’s not about that, of course. Let’s tackle your topics:
Instancing. Back in the golden age of MMORPG’s as you call it, aka the time where they had (compared to today) nearly no players, sure there was no such thing as running dungeons. But while even I agree that instancing can lead to quite surreal situations, it’s vital. Extremely vital. For example: Today, while I had half an hour to play (I know, ashes on my head, but I have to work 10 hours a day), I was trying to do a quest in one of the rare non-instanced areas. And oh, surprise, I wasn’t alone there! I had all those lovely negative and positive interactions you talk about. While waiting for respawn. 20 Minutes. Sure, it’s nice to have those other players here, tagging enemies and everything, but seriously, immersion into the really lovely done quests would be impossible. Even most of the awesome instanced quests would be impossible. Lately I had a quests where something escaped and slaughtered EVERYTHING on it’s way out of the building, and when I followed there were corpses everywhere. In a non-instanced version happy smiling npc would greet me all along. Know what I mean? It would be like “yeah, whatever, did that event even happen?”
As for the death penalty. I agree, when you’re not max level the sums for repair are something to grin about, and that could increase. But as I said before, I’m a casual. Loosing 1-2 Hours worth of XP or Money throw my gaming progress back a whole WEEK. I know by now that most of the time the people complaining about these things have super amounts of gaming time at their hands like “It’s too fast, I played to 50 in a week!”, such stuff is impossible to me. Even as it is I progress slowly, do every quest, and sometimes, damn, you overestimate yourself, or adds spawn, and bam, you’re dead. If the death penalty would be as hard as you like it, I guess I’ve quit the game by now, it would cripple my gaming life too much. Imagine that you only get half an hour a day for gaming and every third day you loose 1-2 Hours of gaming progress.
Same goes for Quick Travel. If you have the time to travel by mount or foot, why don’t you simly do so? Not flaming here, just a serious question. If you have the time at hand, simply do it! Don’t give a **** if the other players are bouncing around, if you enjoy it more with walking, walk. Personally I feel the world being extremely large as it is. Nar Shadarr without a mount? Doing one quest is 5 minute questing and 20 minutes of walking. And I’m goddamn pleased that I can quicktravel back afterwards before I log out. Increasing the Quicktravel to the 18 hours cooldown of the fleetpass would personally shatter my spirit about questing. When the shere amount of travelling to and from a quest takes as long as visiting a friend real life with public transport that’s a limit to me.
As for the Quest indicators … well, I have to agree it makes it kind of simple. But you have again to consider: You are free to read the text, listen to the lovely cutscenes, everything. If one dork doesn’t want to do so and miss everything, you can’t FORCE him to do so. And there’s the risk of it being the other way round too, you know? Like using wow as example, there were quests with “Find XY, he’s around here somewhere”, and that included a whole subcontinent offroads. Or a simple mis-translation in the quest text that had you running around never finding your objective because it was translated differently. Also look at the worlds and think about how you would describe the location with words, on tatooine for example. A quest NPC told me today that “It’s somewhere in the west”. Well. The deserts are HUGE! I guess I’ve searched my *** off if I wouldn’t have had an indicator.
And when it comes to match making, we finally agree about something