WoW isn't so bad for newbies

I've been reading Hexx's Scribblings, the blog of somebody who started World of Warcraft only this year. After a bit over a month his warlock is level 37, and he is obviously having a lot of fun. Yeah, his only visits to dungeons are either being boosted by a high-level character or failing to get anywhere with a bad PuG. And once out the newbie levels he finds there are no people around in the mid-level zones. But he has lots of moments where he has fun, because he learns about how to play his class well, and discovers the wonders of for example fear kiting.

On yesterday's reset post I got a higher than expected number of people saying how great it would be if World of Warcraft would reset and *everybody* would restart at level 1, because then you can have all the fun of restarting a new character combined with all the fun of playing with your friends and in groups of your own level. Without a reset, just playing an alt all alone is not that much fun. But that is because A) we veterans already leveled at least one character up before, and an alt is never as fun as your first character. And B) we remember how much fun leveling up was when everybody was at our level and finding a group for the Deadmines was not a problem. A real newbie has more fun, because he *is* on his first character, and discovers lots of things we already take for granted. And he doesn't know how much better WoW could be with a good group, because he never saw one. I don't know how much fun the newbie is going to have once he hits the endgame and finds that he needs groups but doesn't know how to play well in one, due to lack of practice. But even at the increased leveling speed that is going to take months, and if the endgame is not fun you can always roll an alt and start over. World of Warcraft has a huge amount of content to discover before it becomes boring. It is still the game to recommend to people who never played a MMO and ask you what game they should play. We would wish the problems of low- to mid-level underpopulation could somehow be solved, but even with those problems WoW isn't so bad for newbies.