WoW is fairly solo friendly at the lower levels (Note–Horde is better than Alliance for solo levelling. There’s more social (meaning they tend to hang out in groups) mobs types in Alliance lands). The levelling curve is arranged around a combination of quests and instances though, and if you skip the instances (as a purely solo player is apt to do) you’re going to have to do more grinding because the quests won’t really keep you levelling very fast. I suspect this is one reason the 30-40 area tends to suck, because there’s only one instance around the lower end of that spectrum, and it royally SUCKS (Gnomeregan). It’s difficult to find enough quests to get you through there, and you’ll wind up doing a lot of travelling if you try.
GW is fairly solo-friendly due to the henchman system–all areas are designed with groups in mind, but henchies allow you to fill your group with AIs if you can’t find enough people. Note though that some areas are tougher than others with henchies, and from what I hear certain classes have a harder time of it than others (I’ve heard some complaints from assassins about it).
Both games don’t really have a solo end-game though. WoW focuses around instances a lot, so your only objectives will really wind up being quests (few of which are actually solo-able, to be honest) and faction grinds. You do have the option of levelling alts for some variety though. GW doesn’t have a PvE end-game at all–the main thing to do is PvP, which will be likely frustrating if you don’t have a guild group going, and henchies aren’t really an option–they’re there, but they’re easy kills for the opposing team more than anythign else. Also, while you can play the game with any section of it (with Nightfall, there’ll soon be three), PvP can be frustrating if you don’t have all of them. This is the main reason I stopped playing–I only have Factions, am not planning to buy both Prophecies and Nightfall, and that makes it difficult for me in PvP because I don’t have access to all the skills.
I will note that the main PvE objective of GW isn’t to hit the max level, it’s to finish the storyline, and it plays more like a console RPG for this reason. But as noted above, alts will give you little variety for this reason, since there’s no variety in the quests you can get, unlike in WoW.
“Alternate”. Most players have a “main” character that they spend most of their playing time on, and several “alts”. While most alts are just for variety (I’ve played a warrior, let’s see what a Mage is like), in WoW some players use their mains to find or buy rare items to send to their alts, making them more powerful than the average character of that level. This is called a “Twink”, and can unbalance PvP play.
I haven’t played in a year, but like the others said, WoW is solo-friendly. You won’t be able to do all the quests solo, but you can still raise to level 60 without doing the ones that need groups.
It’s not a game, so much as an environment where you can build just about anything you want. And code it to do whatever you want. And by the way you can design yourself to look like anything you want. Design and coding skills are a plus, but you can do a lot just going through their tutorials. And failing that you can buy whatever you want. So the idea is the players build the environment and the avatars and the props - and code the whole thing - and turn the game into whatever they want.
But so far the players haven’t built anything really fun for non-builders. Except for the sex and gambling. There are casinos (which are, btw, a form of online gambling since second life money can be converted into real money). And there is an unbelievable amount of cybersex. Which - since avatars, environments and animations can be designed to be virtually anything - tends towards the exotic/deeply creepy. Theoretically there are “PG” areas and “mature” areas. But I wouldn’t let my kid anywhere near this game.
It’s one of those games you keep hoping will turn into something. Like someday some player will come up with a fun game or something to do that will keep people coming, but I’m not very hopeful. If anything it reminds me of the abysmal SIMS online, where people spent hours trying to build amazing homes that in the end nobody wanted to come to because there just wasn’t anything to do. Though in principal SL’s potential is limitless and there’s no reason why it couldn’t become a World of Warcraft with quests, or new 3-D internet with access to whatever games or information or chat rooms you’d like - it’s just that so far it’s a bunch of people building houses nobody wants to come to.
You can run second life on a crappy computer with a crappy connection. Slow dial-up may be pushing things, I dunno. My computer’s about 5 years old and my connection is a slow DSL. It works, but it takes a while for the environment to load. Which means you begin walking around in a blank environment and gradually the details fill in. So you’re not sitting there waiting, but you don’t really know where you are for several minutes.
It is, however, free, and the download is I think 20MB, so there’s no reason not to try it for yourself.