I started a Night Elf Rogue last night, because I intend to give the game a fair chance. (Once again I had to wait 45 minutes to log in.)
The Rogue was certainly more engaging in combat: stealth, backstab, pock-picketing :), various powers. However, the missions were (if possible) even more tedious. Run to the cave to find the dude; run back and say you found him. Run back to the cave to kill spiders and gather eggs for the antidote, run back to deliver them. Run back with the antidote. In between all that, rush to the store every 3 minutes because inventory is full again. Bleah.
One of the things LotRO did better than WoW was to automatically start you with a full suite of bags. Not that you still won’t fill them up, but it reduces the tedium of the early game a lot.
The game is also more story driven, in fact, with an overarching “epic quest” storyline that runs from 1 to 50 (er, I guess 60 now or whatever the level cap is with Mines of Moria.).
Still, I don’t know if you’re cut out for the ‘traditional MMO’ (Which WoW is, and CoH is not). Maybe you should try Puzzle Pirates.
Maybe I missed it, but why use that server? Choose a server with a low population (look for the “recommended” or “low” tags, but avoid the “pvp” ones). If you have friends on that particular server, and if they really want to help you enjoy the game, they’ll start new toons on whatever low-pop server you choose. That way they can help in a more productive way.
You should be using your time trying the game, not waiting in line. If you ultimately end up buying the game, then you can decide what server you want to play on. Rerolling is easy.
A friend of mine wanted me to try out WoW, and that’s where her characters are. We play City of Heroes together but we (she) had a bad habit of creating characters all over every server and never coming back to them. She didn’t want to go through that all over again with WoW.
I went out today and bought the WoW box, because I figure… heck, the trial is so absolutely crippled, I might as well give it an honest go. Even if I don’t like it the set’s pretty cheap right now.
Pester your friend into lending you gold for some netherweave bags. It’s the least she can do for getting you to roll on a server with nightly queues. Get some gathering professions and you’ll have plenty of gold in no time.
I don’t know how they limit character creation in CoH, but WoW lets you create ten characters per server, up to a total of 50. If one class doesn’t click with you, you may as well roll an extra character to get a taste of a different class. Different races’ starting zones have different aesthetics too. Just bear in mind that there’s not much point in keeping both Horde and Alliance characters on the same server (cross-faction item transfers involve a convoluted process, but same-faction transfers are cheap and easy). If you want to give the other faction a try, I suggest picking a different, low-population (i.e. queue-free) server.
City of Heroes lets you roll 12 characters per server on all 11 servers; they also let you buy up to 24 additional slots per server (for a total of 396 characters).
Talk about long travel times. Wow doesn’t have anything on FFXI when it comes to tedious.
But other than that, I was very fun, assuming you could find a party, if not, you just stood around pretty much doing nothing. I guess you could solo, but it was more of a time passer than actually being productive (in the MMO sense not the real life one :D).
From watching my brother play now, soloing seems quite a bit more viable.
What would have made that game so much better to me would have been cheaper monthly fees and game cards you could buy at the store, more people playing would have made that a really good game. But $15 a month plus $1 for each additional character is a little too much especially since WoW became popular. I left FFXI to play WoW.
