or a very kind definition of "huge". With Apple's market share in the desktop and laptop world somewhere between 4 and 10%, depending on who you ask, those 5% look rather bleak to me. Either they barely manage to keep their few hardware customers from jumping ship or they lose about half of the many Mac users to competing browsers. Neither option sounds much like a success.
OK, so what happens to those numbers when you add iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches to them?
The Dreamcast was dying long before anybody figured out how to easily pirate games. Saying piracy killed it is revisionist history. Sony did their best to kill it with premature product announcements of the PS2, and Sega had a terrible reputation with the public as a result of the Sega Saturn.
Of course, the Dreamcast also only beat the PS2 to market by 6 months in Japan and a year in North America...
Actually, GP poster is incorrect, the EULA comes up when: 1. You start the PS3 for the first time. 2. You clear all the settings on the PS3 OS (I think...). 3. You update the firmware (note: not download it; it also appears if you install it from USB)
Similarly, the DMCA talks about the requirement of "effective protection". Can it really be called "effective" when it's broken? I'd call that ineffective, and therefore not covered.
Good thing you're not a lawyer. The DMCA uses the word "effective" only in terms of dates. However, it uses the words "effectively controls" repeatedly throughout.
Here's what effectively means, according to Merriam-Webster:
Call me when they finally get it working on the new PS3s you can buy in stores. Those are generally referred to as "Slim" and have never had OtherOS support.
The major issue with systems like these is probably drivers for the disk controllers. You obviously can't install an OS without using the disk controller. Everything else you can install afterwards. But what if your OS install disk doesn't have a driver for the disk controller in your machine?
Most of the time, the generic disk controller drivers are "good enough" to get the base OS installed. Of course, if it was a server circa 2003, it likely used SCSI disks, and yes, there are about a billion and a half different SCSI drivers... although, to be fair, EIDE/SATA with RAID has the same problem.
Even worse, if you had an IDE (or SATA, iirc) drive >137GB, WinXP (and likely 2k3) wouldn't recognize the disk even WITH appropriate drivers unless your disc had SP1 or newer on it. Either that or the installer would crash, I can't remember which.
For Windows, the answer has historically been to bang F6 at the appropriate moment during installer boot and shove a floppy disk containing a special "OEM" driver in. What's that? Your machine no longer has a floppy drive because they are an obsolete technology? It doesn't work with your USB floppy drive because there is only a limited set that are supported? Then you are left cooking your own install disk with the OEM drivers on it, using nLite or similar.
Yes, when you deal with older OSes, you have to deal with old limitations as well. Windows Vista, Server 2008, 7, and Server 2008 R2 all support CD/DVD and USB flash drives for loading OEM drivers.
With the Windows proprietary model, of course, everyone has their own super-secret-sauce driver, so it's impossible to fit them all on the install disk. Older drivers must be frequently dropped from the disk image or it won't fit in 700MB.
Why 700MB? Windows discs are DVDs now, bumping that to 4.7GB.
Linux tends to solve this problem by just having drivers integrated into it. One of the advantages of the Linux driver development model is that because the source is available for most drivers and most devices in a similar class need similar driver code, adding a new driver typically just involves adding either a very small abstraction layer or sometimes just a row in a list of supported devices, so the basic kernel can have support for a vast selection of devices in a relatively small space which happily fits on an install CD. Drivers only get thrown out of the main kernel when they get extremely obsolete AND a maintenance headache, so Linux tends to support more and more hardware each year.
No, the problem here is that Microsoft only writes generic drivers and drivers for its own hardware (mice, game controllers, etc...). For specific devices, it relies on the manufacturers to provide drivers... and most of them don't provide older device drivers for newer OSes.
There *are* exceptions. nVidia and ATI (now AMD) are two. The catch here is that, at least with nVidia, their "Universal" drivers only go so many generations back. Right now, they go back to the GeForce 6 line, which were released in mid-2004.
2.2250738585072011e-308 is a pretty specific number, is the bug just associated with this number or are there more potential floats out there waiting to be found?
It's one digit (the last one before the e; should be a 4 instead of a 1) from the minimum positive value for an IEEE-754 double precision floating-point number.
They write aimbots, not player bots. You cant just run a bot, wlak away, and be level 50 like you could with Glider.
Um, no. Hell, just google "Call of Duty bot" and check the results.
Bots are fairly common for FPS games. It's just that most of them are intended to be NPCs and show up in games as such. Engines like Source even have AI Node files for maps so that the bot AIs know how the map is traversed. These same types of things are built into the Unreal map format.
Player bots would just be external programs that operate on the same principle, but they would pretend to be a specific player instead of identifying as a bot.
Since FPS games have keybinds, a bot can just emulate these keybinds rather running through the program. The problem is making the AI smart enough to properly interpret what the host computer sends back to it and respond to it appropriately.
On a similar note, I've heard that Glider does much more than just kill enemies. For instance, it can also follow flights paths back to a capital city, go into an auction house and list things up for sale automatically. It can also likely sell junk items to vendors, repair armor, run back to the corpse if the player somehow died (and resurrect).
It likely can also attempt to engage PvP players on PvP WoW servers... you did know WoW has PvP servers?
I just recieved a 10 day trial for the expansion, so I'll give it a try and see. I didn't hear that they wholy changed the old content other than removing the quests that could no longer be done and modifying the ones left to make them easier.
Yes, a lot of quests were booted from the game and replaced with entirely new quests.
Here are how I classify some of the zones I've run across, at least from the Horde side. Note, I only leveled characters through some zones, mostly in Kalimdor.
Mixed quests, done in an intelligent manner (meaning that old quests have had their quest givers moved as appropriate to keep the zone flow): Ashenvale Forest Northern Barrens Felwood Winterspring
Mixed quests, done in a stupid manner (meaning that old quests are still the "go do this quest on the other side of the zone" type): Dustwallow Marsh Desolace
Entirely old quests: Silithus (Seriously, wtf were you thinking Blizzard? Gates of Ahn'Qiraj was 5 years ago...)
Note: Alterac Mountains are part of Hillsbrad now. Alterac also seems to have been tossed out as a questing area. The ruins of the city has some mobs, as do Strahnbrad and the Growless Cave. Uplands is devoid of mobs now, as is the area in the north-west corner of the zone next to Lordamere Lake.
More importantly, if you followed TOR closely (spoilers to follow), you'd know that the story of the jedi starter area centers around you retrieving and using the hilt of the first light saber ever made, and in the process you discover an ancient Sith holocron imprinted with the personality of a Sith lord of old. You can now follow your jedi master in a path to the light side, or make shocking evil choices to become the Sith lord's apprentice while deceiving your fellow jedi about it all. That's the starter area before level 10 - all presented in full Bioware cinematic style. I've got more than 1000 hours in on WoW, including the latest improvements in the expansion Cataclysm, and I can tell you, that blows anything in WoW out of the water story-wise, including the big-ticket year-long overarching story lines in that game. And that's just the starter area of the jedi.
You'd be surprised at the stories you can find in some of the lower level zones even in WoW these days.
For instance (spoilers to follow), Silverpine Forest is all about Sylvanus's plot to turn the humans fleeing from Hillsbrad into Forsaken (against the Warchief's express wishes), and upon failing that (they get turned into Worgen), she decides to kill all the Worgen and take over Gilnaes. To do this, she resurrects three former Gilnaen lords (Lord Godfrey and his two lackeys) that abhor the idea of becoming Worgen. Of course, when it turns out that Sylvanus and the Forsaken are about to win, Lord Godfrey one-shots Sylvanus.
Yes, you read that right: Lord Godfrey, the new final boss of Shadowfang Keep, one-shots Sylvanus. She's dead. Slain. Released from eternal life.
Too bad it's not permanent and her three Val'kyr sacrifice themselves to resurrect her.
It's still not as entertaining as watching the Warchief toss Overlord Krom'gar off a cliff in Stonetalon Mountains, but eh.
By that explanation, then WOW should have failed long ago because the first couple hours of WOW are extremely underwhelming. The intro areas are full of weak, uninteresting creatures of which you are constantly assigned to killing a set number of them and upon turning in the quest, you will receive X amount of experience and X item. Cataclysm has changed this slightly with the new cut scenes, but it's still essentially the same. Bioware is at least trying to change this up by throwing in player choice to the mix in these initial tutorial quests, and the choices you make could have profound effects later on. They could just affect the reward you get. You don't really know and there's no reloading to see the other outcome and that's part of the whole appeal. If someone buys a MMORPG and only gives it an hour, they weren't going to give it a chance in the first place.
It's funny that you would mention Cataclysm, as one of the new WoW starting areas I played had me (iirc) whipping troll mining workers, running around picking up friends in a car, getting money from a bank, spending money on bling, cheating in a game of soccer, breaking open a bank safe, stealing artifacts from my boss's mansion... and that's all before level 5.
That would be the first Goblin starting area, Kezan. The second, Lost Isles, is more traditional starting area, although you still do things like throwing bananas at monkeys, taking photographs of wall markings, turning into a spinning weedwhacker and killing parodies of the Plants vs. Zombies plants (which also appear later in the game), etc... in addition to the usual killing monsters.
In general, it's a fun world if you play a game to enjoy the story, the environment, and the other folks who play. If your enjoyment is leveling as fast as possible and just clicking accept whenever you're offered a quest, it's not really for you.
That would be the players fault, not WoW's. Now, before December 7, 2010, a lot of WoW's old zones did feel a bit slapdash, with quests running you everywhere.
Those days are gone now. Every zone in WoW now has a storyline, and the quests are now done in chains. Even the starting zones deal with the recovery following the Shattering of the world.
Now, having said that, you usually get one main quest and a few related quests to do in each section of a zone. You *could* call these "filler" quests, but they almost always have something to do with the zone's story in some way. There are exceptions, particularly in zones where a few of the original quests were left in place (*coughdesolacecough* *coughSILITHUScough*).
(Seriously, Blizzard, why were you too lazy to change any of Silithus's quests? They're literally the same ones that were added when Silithus was redone in the Gates of Ahn'Qiraj (WoW 1.9) patch five years ago.)
I played WoW solid for the past 6+ years (since Beta), Granted I did not buy the new expansion, but they may have changed things on the last 5 levels for leveling, but there is no way your telling me that If I went in and bought a copy and leveled a Wargen from level 1 that it would be 90% grindfest till level cap. I have an 80 of every class, with precata max levels in every crafting professions, and gear well into the Icecrown levels on all of them.
You are aware that everything from 1-60 has been redone?
If your goal is to reach 85 as quickly as possible, then yes, you'd probably play it as grindy.
However, all old world zones (except Silithus) have had a lot of changes made to them. Some still have old quest chains in them (Northern Barrens), but move the quest givers so they're right on top of one another; those zones also have additional quests to fill in the gaps.
Quests in general have been rearranged so that they flow from one area of a zone to the next. In the 10-20 zones, you also tend to have free transportation around the zone. This is most prevalent on the Horde side in Azshara, which not only has a huge fixed cross-zone transit (the Goblin Rocketway, which has 5 stops... you talk to the Rocketway guy and choose which destination you want), but also has at least 4 places where you are placed on a vehicle or mount that automatically take you to your next destination, and at least one point where you are directly teleported to your next location.
In an MMO I'm killing 50 womprats for exp and some quest prize. Its almost 100% deterministic. I could write an app that plays WoW for me and does a great job,, please feel free to google "glider." I couldn't write an app that can play Battlefield for me. With live players there are too many variables, too many strategies, etc. In MMOs I just cast one of my only assault spells and drink a healing potion when need be. In BF I need to think about what the objective is, where the enemy is, if I should perform a defensive role or offensive role, if I need to take out armor, if my squadleader has sent an order, if I can get armor, if I can get a heli, how many tickets we have left, where to plant mines, where snipers might be hiding, whether i'll need a tracer for armor, etc.
People write bots for FPS games all the time. Granted, the AI for those bots depends entirely on the person who programmed them, whether AI pathing points are in maps, what logic they use in certain situations, etc...
Speaking of MMOs, they're not always the "kill 50 womprats" type. In fact, bots for MMOs very rarely, if ever, do quests. Simply put, there's too much variety in quest types, plus you can programmatically tell whether the character gains exp from killing a specific enemy or not. Therefore, MMO bots just kill enemies for XP and items.
on a side note regarding point 3. I'm not sure there have been many, if any MMORPG's that were actually released without thousands of bugs and issues. WOW for one was shocking bug riddled in the first week of release.
Worse yet, WoW didn't have any excuse for the majority of its launch issues. The ran an open stress test that still limited the number of people in it, the servers couldn't handle that load, and they still proceeded to launch the game two weeks later.
CoH took an interesting twist on the normal MMO concepts. It's not nearly as good endgame as WoW in and of itself, but there's the Architect System for user designed content a lot of which is pretty good and there's enough of it to "hide" the grinding.
I'm sorry, I played CoH back around when it first came out, and at that point, the grind was LITERALLY all there was to the game.
The Architect system you mentioned wasn't introduced until 2009, 5 years after the game launched.
There's also the whole "archetype" concept, where you have classes that are general functions and a lot of variations in how it works. For example it has a "ranged DPS with minor utility and a tiny bit of melee" class (Blaster), with a bunch of options for what kind of ranged DPS you do (ranging from assault rifles to throwing fire) and what themed utility you have. There's another class that is "group support with moderate ranged DPS"(Defender) that actually shares a bunch of options with the Blaster as far as ranged attacks but has completely different sets of utility powers, and there are class modifiers that change how the abilities actually function. A Blaster and a Defender can both throw a Lightning Bolt for example but the Blaster will be able to at an earlier level, the Blaster will deal more damage with it, but the Defender will drain more of his target's Endurance. Literally, a ranged attack by a Blaster will do more damage than one by any other heroside archetype, but that same power will do less damage but have more potent side effects when used by a Defender.
Sure, the mix and match character setup was interesting, but I'd already played another MMO that did something like that: Star Wars Galaxies.
WoW just had a massive retooling to make the first 60 levels feel less grindy. For instance, a lot of zones now tell a story.
I can think of two really good examples here. However, the one that was more memorable to me is Stonetalon Mountains (as Horde).
You arrive in the zone on a caravan, after being inducted into Krom'gar's Army (as a Grunt, I recall).
Rearm bombs and hunt down Alliance spies.
Head to Krom'gar Fortress. Once there, burn down tents that make up the Alliance base in the area, while assassinating the Alliance leader in the area.
Reconstruct one of the war machines in the area, then use it to destroy the Alliance war machines and Engineers.
Defend Kom'gar Fortress against an Aerial assault, using the base's cannons.
Go to another base on the Outskirts of the Southern Barrens to defend it from both the Alliance and the rogue Tauren in the area.
Head back to the Fortress to fly a bomb halfway across the zone (making a refueling pitstop, at which time you hunt down more Alliance spies).
Destroy the Alliance Ballista defenses.
Find out that the General in the army killed the son of the area's Tauren Chieftain and framed the Alliance for it, then proceed to kill said General.
Tell the Overlord that the General is dead... then watch the Overlord arrive personally to drop the previously mentioned bomb on a suspected Alliance base that the Tauren had proven wasn't REALLY an Alliance base.
(SPOILER) And after all that, watch the Horde Warchief arrive, who then tosses the Overlord off a cliff because he killed innocent people, even if they were Alliance.
Did I mention that you get promoted through the ranks of Krom'gar's army, until you're made General just before he drops the bomb?
Sure there were some quests that were done just to kill time, but WoW in general has a much more cohesive (and epic) storyline and structure than it used to. Silverpine Forest / Ruins of Gil'naes is likely an even better of an epic storyline where (SPOILER) Sylvanus, leader of the Forsaken (Undead) is actually killed off before being resurrected, but I couldn't remember the entire storyline of that one.
Note: The old version of Stonetalon Mountains was just a random collection of quests to fight the rogue Tauren, stop the Venture Company from pillaging the land, kill some random monsters to perform crazy voodoo rituals, plant some plants, fight some harpies and wyverns because... well... they were there.
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Given that we're talking about the HTML5 video tag, you'd need IE9*... so this wouldn't cut it.
*Yes, I'm aware IE9 isn't out yet... actually, wasn't it due out this month?
Microsoft browsers. Apple browsers. Apple iOS devices. pre-2.3 Android devices. GoogleTV. PlayStation 3. Xbox 360. Roku boxes.
This is an off-the-top-of-my-head list of software and devices that support H.264 with no built-in support for WebM.
Note: I did have to look up Google TV, but everything I found said it supported H.264 but not WebM.
Yes, illiteracy is the consequence of not paying the English license fee. ;)
End users don't pay the H.264 licensing fee, and if they did, it's nowhere near $699.
Perhaps you're confusing MPEG with SCO?
OK, so what happens to those numbers when you add iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches to them?
So, why not schedule it sooner rather than later? June 8th is still nearly five months away!
Of course, the Dreamcast also only beat the PS2 to market by 6 months in Japan and a year in North America...
Actually, GP poster is incorrect, the EULA comes up when:
1. You start the PS3 for the first time.
2. You clear all the settings on the PS3 OS (I think...).
3. You update the firmware (note: not download it; it also appears if you install it from USB)
Good thing you're not a lawyer. The DMCA uses the word "effective" only in terms of dates. However, it uses the words "effectively controls" repeatedly throughout.
Here's what effectively means, according to Merriam-Webster:
effectively:
And in case that wasn't absolutely clear:
effect:
FTFY
Call me when they finally get it working on the new PS3s you can buy in stores. Those are generally referred to as "Slim" and have never had OtherOS support.
Most of the time, the generic disk controller drivers are "good enough" to get the base OS installed. Of course, if it was a server circa 2003, it likely used SCSI disks, and yes, there are about a billion and a half different SCSI drivers... although, to be fair, EIDE/SATA with RAID has the same problem.
Even worse, if you had an IDE (or SATA, iirc) drive >137GB, WinXP (and likely 2k3) wouldn't recognize the disk even WITH appropriate drivers unless your disc had SP1 or newer on it. Either that or the installer would crash, I can't remember which.
Yes, when you deal with older OSes, you have to deal with old limitations as well. Windows Vista, Server 2008, 7, and Server 2008 R2 all support CD/DVD and USB flash drives for loading OEM drivers.
Why 700MB? Windows discs are DVDs now, bumping that to 4.7GB.
No, the problem here is that Microsoft only writes generic drivers and drivers for its own hardware (mice, game controllers, etc...). For specific devices, it relies on the manufacturers to provide drivers... and most of them don't provide older device drivers for newer OSes.
There *are* exceptions. nVidia and ATI (now AMD) are two. The catch here is that, at least with nVidia, their "Universal" drivers only go so many generations back. Right now, they go back to the GeForce 6 line, which were released in mid-2004.
It's one digit (the last one before the e; should be a 4 instead of a 1) from the minimum positive value for an IEEE-754 double precision floating-point number.
The Gates of Ahn'Qiraj were first opened in January 2006, so yup.
Um, no. Hell, just google "Call of Duty bot" and check the results.
Bots are fairly common for FPS games. It's just that most of them are intended to be NPCs and show up in games as such. Engines like Source even have AI Node files for maps so that the bot AIs know how the map is traversed. These same types of things are built into the Unreal map format.
Player bots would just be external programs that operate on the same principle, but they would pretend to be a specific player instead of identifying as a bot.
Since FPS games have keybinds, a bot can just emulate these keybinds rather running through the program. The problem is making the AI smart enough to properly interpret what the host computer sends back to it and respond to it appropriately.
On a similar note, I've heard that Glider does much more than just kill enemies. For instance, it can also follow flights paths back to a capital city, go into an auction house and list things up for sale automatically. It can also likely sell junk items to vendors, repair armor, run back to the corpse if the player somehow died (and resurrect).
It likely can also attempt to engage PvP players on PvP WoW servers... you did know WoW has PvP servers?
Yes, a lot of quests were booted from the game and replaced with entirely new quests.
Here are how I classify some of the zones I've run across, at least from the Horde side. Note, I only leveled characters through some zones, mostly in Kalimdor.
Entirely new quests:
Kezan/Lost Isles
Azshara
Silverpine Forest/Ruins of Gilnaes
Stonetalon Mountains
Hillsbrad Foothills/Alterac Mountains
Thousand Needles
Tanaris Desert
Un'goro Crater
Mixed quests, done in an intelligent manner (meaning that old quests have had their quest givers moved as appropriate to keep the zone flow):
Ashenvale Forest
Northern Barrens
Felwood
Winterspring
Mixed quests, done in a stupid manner (meaning that old quests are still the "go do this quest on the other side of the zone" type):
Dustwallow Marsh
Desolace
Entirely old quests:
Silithus (Seriously, wtf were you thinking Blizzard? Gates of Ahn'Qiraj was 5 years ago...)
Note: Alterac Mountains are part of Hillsbrad now. Alterac also seems to have been tossed out as a questing area. The ruins of the city has some mobs, as do Strahnbrad and the Growless Cave. Uplands is devoid of mobs now, as is the area in the north-west corner of the zone next to Lordamere Lake.
You'd be surprised at the stories you can find in some of the lower level zones even in WoW these days.
For instance (spoilers to follow), Silverpine Forest is all about Sylvanus's plot to turn the humans fleeing from Hillsbrad into Forsaken (against the Warchief's express wishes), and upon failing that (they get turned into Worgen), she decides to kill all the Worgen and take over Gilnaes. To do this, she resurrects three former Gilnaen lords (Lord Godfrey and his two lackeys) that abhor the idea of becoming Worgen. Of course, when it turns out that Sylvanus and the Forsaken are about to win, Lord Godfrey one-shots Sylvanus.
Yes, you read that right: Lord Godfrey, the new final boss of Shadowfang Keep, one-shots Sylvanus. She's dead. Slain. Released from eternal life.
Too bad it's not permanent and her three Val'kyr sacrifice themselves to resurrect her.
It's still not as entertaining as watching the Warchief toss Overlord Krom'gar off a cliff in Stonetalon Mountains, but eh.
It's funny that you would mention Cataclysm, as one of the new WoW starting areas I played had me (iirc) whipping troll mining workers, running around picking up friends in a car, getting money from a bank, spending money on bling, cheating in a game of soccer, breaking open a bank safe, stealing artifacts from my boss's mansion... and that's all before level 5.
That would be the first Goblin starting area, Kezan. The second, Lost Isles, is more traditional starting area, although you still do things like throwing bananas at monkeys, taking photographs of wall markings, turning into a spinning weedwhacker and killing parodies of the Plants vs. Zombies plants (which also appear later in the game), etc... in addition to the usual killing monsters.
That would be the players fault, not WoW's. Now, before December 7, 2010, a lot of WoW's old zones did feel a bit slapdash, with quests running you everywhere.
Those days are gone now. Every zone in WoW now has a storyline, and the quests are now done in chains. Even the starting zones deal with the recovery following the Shattering of the world.
Now, having said that, you usually get one main quest and a few related quests to do in each section of a zone. You *could* call these "filler" quests, but they almost always have something to do with the zone's story in some way. There are exceptions, particularly in zones where a few of the original quests were left in place (*coughdesolacecough* *coughSILITHUScough*).
(Seriously, Blizzard, why were you too lazy to change any of Silithus's quests? They're literally the same ones that were added when Silithus was redone in the Gates of Ahn'Qiraj (WoW 1.9) patch five years ago.)
You are aware that everything from 1-60 has been redone?
If your goal is to reach 85 as quickly as possible, then yes, you'd probably play it as grindy.
However, all old world zones (except Silithus) have had a lot of changes made to them. Some still have old quest chains in them (Northern Barrens), but move the quest givers so they're right on top of one another; those zones also have additional quests to fill in the gaps.
Quests in general have been rearranged so that they flow from one area of a zone to the next. In the 10-20 zones, you also tend to have free transportation around the zone. This is most prevalent on the Horde side in Azshara, which not only has a huge fixed cross-zone transit (the Goblin Rocketway, which has 5 stops... you talk to the Rocketway guy and choose which destination you want), but also has at least 4 places where you are placed on a vehicle or mount that automatically take you to your next destination, and at least one point where you are directly teleported to your next location.
People write bots for FPS games all the time. Granted, the AI for those bots depends entirely on the person who programmed them, whether AI pathing points are in maps, what logic they use in certain situations, etc...
Speaking of MMOs, they're not always the "kill 50 womprats" type. In fact, bots for MMOs very rarely, if ever, do quests. Simply put, there's too much variety in quest types, plus you can programmatically tell whether the character gains exp from killing a specific enemy or not. Therefore, MMO bots just kill enemies for XP and items.
Worse yet, WoW didn't have any excuse for the majority of its launch issues. The ran an open stress test that still limited the number of people in it, the servers couldn't handle that load, and they still proceeded to launch the game two weeks later.
I'm sorry, I played CoH back around when it first came out, and at that point, the grind was LITERALLY all there was to the game.
The Architect system you mentioned wasn't introduced until 2009, 5 years after the game launched.
Sure, the mix and match character setup was interesting, but I'd already played another MMO that did something like that: Star Wars Galaxies.
WoW just had a massive retooling to make the first 60 levels feel less grindy. For instance, a lot of zones now tell a story.
I can think of two really good examples here. However, the one that was more memorable to me is Stonetalon Mountains (as Horde).
Did I mention that you get promoted through the ranks of Krom'gar's army, until you're made General just before he drops the bomb?
Sure there were some quests that were done just to kill time, but WoW in general has a much more cohesive (and epic) storyline and structure than it used to. Silverpine Forest / Ruins of Gil'naes is likely an even better of an epic storyline where (SPOILER) Sylvanus, leader of the Forsaken (Undead) is actually killed off before being resurrected, but I couldn't remember the entire storyline of that one.
Note: The old version of Stonetalon Mountains was just a random collection of quests to fight the rogue Tauren, stop the Venture Company from pillaging the land, kill some random monsters to perform crazy voodoo rituals, plant some plants, fight some harpies and wyverns because... well... they were there.
Photoshop's "lite edition" still has an MSRP of $99.99... Amazon sells it for $70 (not counting the $20 MIR ending today).