True, there's a lot of needles grinding. But you learn stuff like lore, the world map, team work etc along the way. You get introduced to items that might be very useful later on in the game and so on. WoW has an enormous amount of depth once you reach the level cap, too much for some one who almost just started. I kept learning more and more about the game even after I had spent thousands of hours playing it. Naturally a lot of that was related to expansion packs with new spells, talents and content, but still it took over a thousand hours of practice at the level cap to become a good player, and I was still far from being one that could play at arena tournaments or fight for world firsts, even though I spent more time in the game world than in the "real world".isiolia wrote: Realistically, who learns every aspect of a game like that first-hand?
Additionally, how long should it really take to learn? I don't play WoW, but FFXI has very similar complaints for new vs old. Practically speaking though, MMOs tend to incorporate a lot of padding either way. They can be complicated, but they're not so complicated that they take hundreds of hours just to learn how to play a class.
At least with FFXi as well, there were plenty of terrible players who put in the time years ago, and plenty of good players now who can absorb and apply information without needing to practice it 1000x over. Good players will be good, bad players will be bad, all there is to it.
It's true though that once you get to the top, you're not going to learn much from first hand experience. Theorycrafting, calculations and strategies are learned from various sites intended for hardcore gamers. Unless you're part of the 0.01% of playerbase who scores world first kills, datamines and figures out this stuff for all the other players.
