Blizzard have done a very good job improveing the game lately imo. You really can be competative in PVP now without being a hardcore raider. Sure the people who put months of work into their gear will have an advantage and so they should but the fights will still be very competative.

I'm very surprised at your experience Crimthian. Were you both the same level and Class? I'm currently a level 54 hunter and I destroy level 60 epic geared hunters if I come accross them with no mana (same as not using specials).

Decent quality gear is very easy to optain now. Blizzard have changed the horrible pvp system (really what were they thinking? we all said it was a terrible idea as soon as it was implemented) now you don't need to dedicate your life to pvp. You PVP, you earn honor, you spend your honor on some very nice items. It's fun and rewarding all the way through your characters life too, Run a few battlegrounds at lvl 18 say and you will be able to buy a nice blue item with your honor.

Burning crusade adds an arena system for people who want 2v2, 3v3 and 5v5 battles and also I belive there is alot more world pvp added.

They are making raids more accessable too by reduceing the raid size from 40 to 25 and making most new raid dungeons winged. So your raid can chose to do just the wing that it wants and thus you arn't dedicating a massive block of time.

I'll be buying the burning crusade and leveling up to 70 (unless Darkfall comes out shortly) and the nice thing about WoW is once you get bored you can sell your account for a nice profit. This is my 3rd time playing WoW, the first time there was no endgame content and I quit (and made a nice profit) second time the pvp system forced you to do nothing but pvp (no alts etc) if you wanted to progress and I quickly got burnt out and quit (and made a nice profit) but now I think they have got it pretty right and it's fun weather you have an hour or all day to play, I'm impressed and I expect to hang around here untill KGB moves into a new game.

It's defiantly the most fun mmo I've played during the leveling process. Yes unfortunatly the pvp isn't as good or as consequential as shadowbane but that had a million and one flaws too and I eagerly await the day that a game manages to get it perfect, fingers crossed for darkfall but for now WoW is the best attempt yet.