I too miss D&D pen and paper games and just developing a character the way you want it to be. I played Dragonrealms, a text based RPG from back in the old pre-unlimited AOL days, up until I started with WOW 2 years ago. I paid too much money for that game basically for the friendships I made in that game.

Our own guild is struggling with wanting something fresh and new and not wanting to leave our friends. Sometimes getting away makes you realize that WOW really is a great game made even greater by the friends we have.

The quests were all the same. No imagination. No storyline. I love WoW’s plot. I (/boast) might know more WoW lore than anyone. Starcraft too; I guess I just love Blizzard.

The cities were not dynamic. There were too many buildings you couldn’t enter. The cities were surrounded by freaking BUBBLES so you couldn’t leave. And each city looked really, the same as the one before it.

You couldn’t move really fast until you had played for a long time and gotten to a high level. The same goes for WoW here, unfortunately; running around is just really slow and dull.

And finally, no gear. Armor has its problems, drama and all, but I don’t think an RPG will ever beat WoW that doesn’t have armor.

As a fairly longtime player of wow, and a dabbler in other games before finding wow. I totally understand you BBB..
Pre wow, I frequented a text based game (mud) called Gemstone III (later renamed Gemstone IV) I know that I put as much time and effort into that game, as I have into WOW over the past few years. They did a lot of things right with that game, and a lot of things wrong..

Being text based, with a command line interface. you had to mentally visualize every bit of the game, from the descriptions of the rooms, to the mobs you fought. The base game was very well thought out, you didn’t have factions like we do with wow. There were no instance dungeons, there were areas where mobs tended to spawn in the wilds and would get tougher and meaner the further you got from town. Sometimes you would have a scripted event, invasion or a massive merchant. (not unlike our undead invasion with 3.0) One of the cool things that I did miss from those days, is that any class could do things not specifically designed for their class to do. Squares (melee only classes like warrior/theives) could spend a lot of training points and learn a few spells, semi’s (bards, rangers) were designed for a mix of spell and sword, but could train exclusively in either should they choose. and pures (mages, warlocks, empaths, and clerics) were designed for magic, but could train to a high degree of weaponry should they choose to do so. Any character could pick pockets, tho rogues were naturally more gifted at that. Any class could unlock/magically pop/physically bash open locked boxes. (only reason i’ve rolled a rogue on wow…) tho i have more fun with elemental blasting charges.

You had the option for player housing that you could outfit to your liking, the option for player run shops, crafting skills were still a little on the weakside. (weapons, enchants, and arrows were about the extent of it) Because of it being text based, player created content was feasable, all the player had to do was use his/her imagination and describe each “room” or “object” as they saw it in their mind.

The reason i left that game, was financial.. in order to have access to player shops/homes you had to be a premium member and end up paying an incredibly stupid amount of money per month.

I would love to see guild halls, player housing and player run shops put into the game. I could definitely see my hunter engineer have a little shop of guns/ammo and my other hunter which skins and makes leather goods providing armor. what this would do to the in game economy, I couldn’t say. it’s much easier afterall to go to the AH and do a buy it now.

But a player created guild hall, that would be something interesting. It would naturally require large quantities of raw materials to build (like a guild scale version of the collection for the AQ event), plus gold to hire the goblin laborers. perhaps even guild members could quest to cut down logs, gather precious metals, base metals, cut jewels, collect herbs to plant a private garden. build a private forge, stock the kitchen, ect.. build (gnomes/engineers) or hire guards. ect.

I could forsee a common room that anyone could enter, and then areas protected by lvl ??? guards that would only allow certain ranks through. I think there are tons of great places to have guild halls, and player homes. an instanced area inside the major cities would be one option (mostly so that the area itself is not taking up the same resources as the city) Perhaps a instance portal in the entrance door for one of the houses in the outter villages (like goldshire or moonbrook)

I think it would be quite fun to leave a mark on the landscape and be able to say “I made this, and it is good.” not only that, but it would help siphon off some more of the excess gold supply from those that have too much money.

Wowsers. I felt like the SW:G folks. I had issues with the lead-up to CoV PvP balancing altering core PvE play…but I was unprepared for how far that process had gone. Playing my MA/SR main was totally disconcerting. Nothing worked right, abilities that used to do one thing now did something totally different, the ED change (ooops, badly thought out name for a patch there) required that I completely redo my hard earned enhancements…and I was getting creamed by stuff I used to destroy in job lots.

Really hard to get into being a superhero when you can no longer do anything Heroic.

-but the character creation tool is still the coolest non-gameplay thing ever.

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/05/12/users-asked-to-desig.html