Everything as instances?

I've been playing MMORGPs for quite a few years now, been through several different games, and currently playing WoW. It was fun while it lasted, but after being level 60 for a few months, everything has become boring.

I've been looking at this game for a bit, and it seems interesting, especially since it's f2p. My question is, from what I heard, everything in this game is handeled in instances, meaning only you or your party will be in the area. I'm not sure if I misunderstood, but how is one suppose to interact with others while questing, exploring, or pvping? Only in the towns? That's the only thing that really doesn't sound too attractive to me.

You are correct, and that's why this game isn't labeled as an MMORPG. Cause it's not

Trust me, you won't even notice. You be so happy about the lack of griefing when you are trying to quest, you'll forget its just your group in the zone. back in the town you'll be interacting with hordes of people and it seems like an MMORPG even though its not.

I think it's been explained before like this. The game is very similar to Diablo 2 online. In Diablo 2 everyone would log on with their accounts and meet in various chat rooms on battle.net. There they could sit and talk, and organize themselves depending on what they wanted to do, and then specific parties of people would create their own instanced games, and go off playing with whomever they liked though seperated from the rest of the other games going on at the same time. In Guildwars the chat rooms that were in battle.net have essentially been made into the towns.

Obviously it's not that simple, and there have been a lot more perks thrown in than "3D chat rooms" but that seems to be essential concept, and should answer any question you had....I think.

That does answer my question, thank you. I still don't like the overall idea of it, perhaps because it's something new. I think I'll give the game a try and see how I like it.

This has been discussed over and over again. The search function would undoubtedly find you all the information you need. However, since I'm already typing now I might as well answer you directly.
Yes, all the actual playing content is instanced. The only areas where you see other people en masse are the towns and outposts, and even then they are limited to a certain number of people per instanced 'district'.
However, I don't see that this is a bad thing. Think for a moment about what, if any, good things massively multiplayer mission areas bring. I personally can't think of any other than realism.
If you think of the disadvantages though, they are many:
Ganking
PKing
Kill Stealing
Server Load
Stalking and harassment
The list goes on and on.

EDIT: Wow, two replies and a response from the author of the topic all in the time it took me to type my response