Well i've decided to stick with AION as my MMO for at least the rest of 2009. The polish of the game is fantastic because it has been out for so long in Korea & China so it feels very good.
It hasn't become a grind fest for me yet, but i am only lvl21 at the moment and have plenty of quests to go through (although i hear it gets a little quieter for quests in the mid 30s until you hit the cap at 50) but you are meant to pvp from 30 as you should have learned how to play your character by then and so can participate well in pvp battles.
Here is a list of the MMOs i've played in this year, with reasons i dropped them:
AOC - good graphics, but as soon as you leave the starting area you have no idea WTF to do.
WAR - Lacks serious amounts of polish - i think i made a list of about 25 bugs in the interface when i played for a few days, so i gave up as that's just lazy programming.
WOW - was my main MMO for a couple of years, but recently it's been boring raids and the people playing have serious superiority complexes a lot of the time.
SWG - My first MMO but now it is dying - servers are very quiet, pvp is very hard to find now so i can't do anything in the game anymore.
AION has built well over all of these games - it has a good starting area but continues to guide you through your leveling until your 30s where i hear you do start to grind as well as raid. It is well polished as i said above - i've only found a couple of minor terrain bugs where i'd got where i shouldn't have but it just warped me back to the nearest safe ground which i could walk on. The community is overall quite fun and helpful - you can block people from being able to see your gear in game so you can avoid the snobbery that is so common in WOW these days. It is also a PvP end-game with a huge pvp section called the Abyss (as well as "rifts" that randomly open between zones allowing raiding parties to enter enemy levelling territory for lvl20+ characters and cause some havoc).
Not sure what you mean about AOC and not knowing where to go. The main map tells you the level range for areas, and the quests you get immediately after Tortage hint where you should be going, if anything just by the npc you have to visit in '...so and so lands..'
With exception to LOTRO it's probably the last recent MMO, where you aren't completely funnelled into leveling in ONE area until you reach a certain level, then move on, as opposed to Aion, which is completely linear.
People keep talking about how Aion is so polished..well I'd bloody hope so, it's WoW 2.0 in visuals, mechanics and parts of the theme.
It doesn't mean it sucks, but this que issue is laughable. Why do people defend companies when they regurgitate (as an Aion forum user so elegantly put it) the same old MMOs with the same old boring mechanics? If you're using a cloned template, how on Earth can you go wrong, so wrong that you have five hour que times?
I feel bad for some people in a way - stuck in a que for sub-par quality game. What a slap in the face.
But NCsoft has really shot themselves in the foot by not doing something else that could be new to the MMO market, and that's proper server allocation and location. As we've been discussing on Aion forums, we cannot understand why they have six ENG servers labelled ENG and NOT "UK" and expect everyone and their brother from all of Europe to cram into them. Do they really think people are going to play on the Deutsch or Spanish server when they know the ENG are more populated? And as you know, every MMO idiot thinks massive population is a good thing, but it's not, it's the worst. Putting latency aside, over crowded servers ruin game play and the economic market there-in.
They need to block IPs to UK based servers from people out of a certain range, and institute centralized European servers for people who are English speaking. Everyone wins that way.
The only really great thing about Aion, is that there's lots of gear that isn't bind only. Meaning you can get good and use-able equipment, that CAN be RESOLD. This is something that's been lacking for a number of years now with MMOs.
Curse my body and its inability to go without sleep! :shadedshu
