I gave the free trial a try. Start in an area with shops that have equipment a little out of your price range, talk to NPC's to get riveting quests like 'kill 10 wolves'. Everything runs so smoothly in that the quests are a little challenging at first but as you complete them you can level up and buy the better equipment, just in time for the area being too easy for you at which point it's time to move onto the next zone. Then the whole process repeats again, and apparently you're supposed to grind it out like this out for over 100+ hours or something before you finally get to the 'good' part of the game.
I mean if it came out 5 years earlier I probably would have gotten hooked on it, but I'd already wasted a lot of time on an MMO and had played more than enough RPG's to recognize what a great big Skinner box WoW is.
It seems to me like you're complaining about how balanced and polished the game is. "Everything runs so smoothly" is usually high praise, not criticism. That's precisely one of the big reasons why the game was as good as it was. Blizzard knows balance and polish.
BTW, I found the "good part" of the game to be the early game, the leveling up and discovering new lands and monsters. I'm surprised that you just thought of that as "grind." Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm going to guess that you had recently come off of raiding in EverQuest, weren't interested in starting 100 hours of leveling up again and just wanted to get to the endgame/raiding content. If so, then you may have ruined WoW for yourself through expectation and impatience. After all, you said that you probably would've been hooked if you'd played it years earlier, suggesting that the issue wasn't with the game.
WoW is/was a decent game. EQ2 was better.
When Wow released you could play it on a mediocre family PC. EQ2 needed a gaming PC so people without one had to turn the graphics way down and still had framerate issues. It was easier to say the game sucked then that their PC sucked and couldn't play it.
If you happen to be suggesting that WoW beat out EQ2 because it ran well on older PCs, then I think that you're simplifying things too much. If EQ2 had more modest hardware requirements, it still would've lost to WoW, IMO. After all, EQ1, which was still going and had much more modest hardware requirements, couldn't compete, either. WoW was simply more accessible (not just system requirements-wise, but it appealed to more than just hardcore gamers) and forgiving, had a more attractive art design, had a more popular/conventional fantasy theme and was more polished. It was a perfect storm that hit every note to become a massive hit. EQ and EQ2 were like Windows Mobile smartphones trying to compete once the iPhone came out. Being around first and being superior in some ways don't mean as much as being perfectly polished and packaged for mass appeal.
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