I will tell you why Planeshift is better. After levelling to max level on so many different games, I'm tired of the whole fight-level thing. I'm way too experienced to play a commercial game without being accused of cheating. You think I'm lying? My team was banned from WoW not becuase we cheat but because their GMs don't understand the concept of skilled players... We don't have those problems on Planeshift because nobody cares if we one-drop a rat.
But enough bragging and whining about WoW. I'm happy to have someplace where my friends and I can meet online and chat, and if there is something we don't like about the game there is a chance, maybe a small one, we could learn to become developers and fix it.
My sister is a very good artist and she is learning Autodesk. I wrote a rock tunneling game in BASIC and everybody loved it. I am a beginning C programmer and I've had some success following the nehe OpenGL tutorials and making my own scenes from USGS elevation data. I went on to write a couple of C++ plugins for Moray to import and export .vrml, .dxf and .pov formats, create geodesic and eliptical domes of N verticies, random domes and tesselation. I have created a couple VRML avatars from scans of my face and clothing, using Spazz3d and made emote animations for them and had them responding to events within HANIM specification... I realize that these aren't serious developer qualifications, but I like to play around with things and keep the midnight oil burning. My priorities are all messed up. I live in a box and drive a bicycle so I can afford the best top-of-the-line computers and fastest broadband they offer. I'm always researching and downloading the latest free development tools. Someday I will make another game.