Yeah, exactly my thought - WoW saw Aion do it and said 'oh, we gotta get in on this'. They aped some nice ideas off Warhammer last year when that launched too! I guess all us WoW fans have to do is hope for new MMOs every year that WoW can ninja ideas from :-P

Aion did NOT invent this idea. Sorry.

Great!
Nice to know all the post-Vanilla WoW-tourists like yourself are leaving, any real gamer would have left WoW AT LEAST months ago (if not about a year ago by now).

Personally not playing Aion because they refuse to have servers for a game made specifically for Koreans (a.k.a. a nation with zero latency issues) near or within Australia. Instead placing them literally on the other side of the world. The grind I could have lived with (while annoying itself, the endgame itself sounds satisifing enough to go with it), but grinding with the worst latency one could possibly have is beyond my patience.

Actually, I first saw this Idea in Free Realms, and it wouldn't surprise me if some other MMO had done it before.