[SwordMage]

I think some of the reason your ideas are not being received as warmly as you had hoped is that we have known for a very long time that Vanguard's game play would be the way it turned out to be. We knew it was going to be the heir to the EQ vision (as opposed to the EQ2 direction, which is aimed at a different audience). The developers have been very up-front about where the game was going and the kind of audience it was aimed at.

What you are suggesting sounds, to some of us, as a rejection of the vision which we have so long waited to be realized.

What we have been saying, not always clearly, is that there is room in the MMO universe for games with different design philosophies. Questions of how powerful the macro system is, or how fast leveling is, or how many levels are what game designers struggle with and, fortunately, not every designer comes up with the same answers.

I don't think that anyone is saying that what you want out of a game is wrong or bad. However, some of us would use criteria, such as you express, as a measure in selecting the game we want to devote our time to, rather than as a mold to reshape our selected game.