As a former WoW player, there's one thing that has really impressed me as both a player and a game developer: the quests in AoC.

Now, there are some problems with AoC's quests: the dialog system takes me out of the game, most notably hiding the chat window so I can't see important messages while interacting with an NPC. I also had one situation where a quest's cutscene happened while a monster walked by. By the time the scene ended and a boss monster started to attack me, I was down to less than half health! I died quickly once the boss monster came up and beat on me a few times.

The one redeeming characteristic: almost every quest's items drop every time. When I'm told to go gather crocodile skins from crocodiles, I get at least one skin per kill, if not more. That's the nice way of doing random quest drops: monsters randomly drop more than one of the needed item!

Compare this with WoW where some quests really took you out of the game. "Why does only one out of every three monsters have eyeballs (or whatever other random part you need for the quest)?" Some quests' drops were so rare that sometimes you weren't sure if you were even killing the right monsters for the quest. "Are you sure these are the monsters?" I'd ask my friends. "Yes!" they'd respond, "I got a drop from them yesterday!"

The one quest so far that I have found that does not guarantee drops was not so tough: a quest where you have to gather gems eaten by different beasts. You generally kill enough beasts for other quests that you find the gems you need. But, this is one quest out of the dozens I've done so far like this.

For me, this is a lot more fun. It's nice to know that once you find the monster, you don't have to worry about if it'll drop the item or not. You also don't have the random number generator screwing you over and making you kill a small patch of monsters over and over again because the drop didn't trigger as often as the designers thought it was going to.