I thought the explicitly mentioned they were not adopting this model in western versions of the game? I'm pretty sure trion is keeping the content that forces the game to remain open world / sandboxy. from what I understand the kr version has a lot of instanced content?

Also, myself and some of my friends from wow and other games will be around at launch. we're just hanging out now watching how the betas go and seeing how they update content, but we will most definitely be around.