Instant PvP: Please see Guild Wars for instantly accessible PvP where level doesn’t matter and skill > play time.

Open groups: agree here.

Busy and dumb: Seriously? I hate quests like this. All new MMO’s do them, and I find it boring as hell. I only quest in very early levels to get the first few ‘dings’, and now I never take new quests when entering an area.

Modding: Seems pretty standard already.

Tome of Knowledge: I wouldn’t say concentrated awesome, so much as kind of nice. Definitely an improvement on previous games, but not revoutionary by any stretch of the word (and only limited to one page of quests, grrrr).

Not 100% sure about the marking of quest destinations on the map, on one hand it feels like a step into trivializing the game, but on the other, as you say, people will just use addons to get this ease anyway, so why not make it available to everyone?

I got stuck in a Stone Troll Crossing scenario, everyone got booted at the end but me, so I took off my clothes and jumped off the center column over and over for about a half hour, trying to see what I could unlock. It was a lot of fun.

Being able to jump directly into scenarios from the moment you enter the world is awesome.

Being able to earn XP, coin, and items through any and all PvP is also awesome.

This is one of the few things about WAR that WOW is going to blatantly rip off, because it’s so awesome.

You answered your own question. The client is ALREADY in the hands of the enemy. People who want to bot and hack do not need you to open up the client to them, because they’re just doing it on the level of changing memory directly, changing incoming and outgoing packets directly, etc.

You don’t protect yourself from hacks and bots by burying your head in the sand and pretending that if a computer illiterate noob can’t figure out a way to exploit, you’re safe. You protect yourself by assuming everyone is an expert programmer who wants to cheat in every and any possibly way they can.

If information is going to be available to your client at all, you might as well make it available to all via an open client. If there is information that can’t be made available like this without breaking the game, that’s a pretty good sign that information shouldn’t be getting passed to the client in the first place.

Tug-of-war style (Gates of Ekrund): flags are arranged in a rough line, with a central flag and two anchor flags. Respawns enter typically by way of endpoint flag and conflict exists in the center.

Whoever holds their healers’ rally point between the closest and center flags usually wins.

King-of-the-hill style (Nordenwatch): flags are arranged in a triangle. Respawns enter near a close flag, and roughly equadistant from the other two.

Winning can be done by a large force holding the center and/or a small force interrupting incoming respawns.

Unique (Khaine’s Embrace): two close flags, linked by several approaches, each once roughly the same distance from each other as from respawn areas of each side. Either side must capture both flags to score points. When one side holds both flags for more then ten seconds, the flags explode in a wide radius for fatal damage and reset to neutral.

Winning requires enough defensive organization to defend one flag while attacking the other, and a sense of timing to avoid the exploding flags while being ready to recapture them when they turn neutral. It also requires enough offensive organization to be able to rush a seized flag yet know when to flee to avoid the blast.

That much diversity in something low-tier is unusual and refreshing. It shows a responsiveness towards accomodating people who would otherwise play twinks, a playstyle that appeals to long-term players but tends to keep newer players away from PvP.