I am not the only person who has expressed this opinion, either. There was, until a short while ago, the following post on the World Of Warcraft forums, from use Giiba:

Before the 2.0.1 patch I was using this addon (http://wowvault.ign.com/View.php?view=UIMods.Detail&id=99). It changed my gameplay experience, I was suddenly able to target far more effectively. Now with the latest patch it is broken… and while some of the features (attack on assist and smart actions) might have been what Blizzard wanted to stop, the ability to cycle through the targets of your raid group was immensly helpful.

Blizzard, if you are going to gimp the targeting abilities of addons/macros, please, please, please, give us a targeting system that isn’t utterly %$#@ing useless. As a hunter I have to move 11 yards in from max range for the ‘target nearest’ to work. And even then it is a pathetic excuse for targeting often putting me on something I don’t care to attack (another players pet for instance) and has no cycling ability. The other day I was playing grand theft auto and I rediscovered the targeting system in that game… it is both intuitive and easy to learn. First you target the nearest target, then you can cycle left or right from your current target with the push of a button.

I find clicking targets that are 41 yards away to be difficult at best once you factor in the lag jumping that always occurs, and the assist function only helps me if I have another friendly player around (and they will do the same lag jumping as a hostile).

Please blizzard give us some sort of functional targeting system.

This topic has since been removed.

When combined with the inexplicable lack of enemies on the radar, this makes the game a chore to play. I am amazed that it has become as popular as it has.

But as Ken (Arioch) says, different strokes for different folks.

I’ve also found that simply targeting enemies and finding things are more of a chore in Warcraft than in Guildwars. Since the games can be updated with relative ease, it is a mystery to me why Warcraft does not have simple features that even older Blizzard games (Diablo 2, Warcraft 3, Starcraft) had, such as highlighting the current target, showing items on the ground when a key (alt) is pressed, etc. Particularly annoying is the fact that you have to manually turn your character to face your enemy if you want to keep attacking them. If the target moves to the side, your character will not pivot to continue to attack them. Why? Was that too hard to program, or did the developers think this adds a great element of fun to the game?

On the plus side, however, there seems to be a lot more to explore on the world map, and much more “granularity” to the Items aspect of the game. Guildwars wanted people to focus less on gear and more on player skill, and they went too far – in my opinion – with making items and armor pretty plain and uninteresting. While I admire and agree with that sentiment, there is a certain element of excitement and discovery that this “gear focus” adds to a game, and which I miss when playing Guildwars.

So, while I’ve played Guildwars just about to death by now, I won’t un-install it because it is by no means inferior to Warcraft. By the same token, I probably won’t buy more than one month at a time with Warcraft. It’s just WORK to play Warcraft. I could see myself getting sick of all the extra effort. I might look for something else.