I'm going to give you examples of a couple other games so you can compare SGW to them!
One of the biggest reason I quit playing Age of Conan (at level 38) is the enemy respawns and the death penalty (in relation to travel after death). In that game, many maps are very large so running across them can take very long, especially when you have to kill hordes of respawning enemies to get there. Dying will allow you to warp to certain spots you found in the map, but a big gripe about it is that there were only a few spots and so many times I found myself running all the way back to where I died and to me it was a huge waste of time. Also, I hated that I would consantly have to kill things that were attacking me on the way there, when I already killed them before. Also, I didn't like that someone killed a boss I needed to kill and then I had to wait for it to respawn.
In Guild Wars though, a game I like more, everything is instanced and made for the group/party of ppl you take with you. When you kill something, it doesn't come back, so when you die running back is no problem cause if you follow the same path back no pesky respawning enemies to annoy you. When you leave the area/map and then come back all the enemies are back. Also, instanced areas allow for scripting parts that can work very very well for storyline (wink wink), you can even have cutscenes no problem.
As you can tell I'm more into the storyline driven single-player RPG. I understand that ppl like a persistant world whereby they like to see other players doing all sorts of things, but to me they just get in the way (unless they are in my party) of my objectives (and unless they are doing different activities than I am doing). Anyways, I'm very excited that you mentioned that all the quests will be chronological in story and you can even use that knowledge to your advantage for other quests and right now I think storyline is one of the most important aspects of a game I LIKE. I'm curious as to how you will implement storyline when other players in the MMO server can just waltz in and say trigger some sort of script somewhere and then I'll be like, "great, he runied the story for me, cause now I know something crazy like THAT happens when I walk over to this ruin or spot. Oh great, now I also have to wait for this thing to respawn so I can get on with triggering my cutscene (hopefully you have cutscenes)." To me it seems like good storytelling (I mean visually, not written text) requires instances, in which events happen, which unfold the story, as you play through the mission and you play this mission with your squad/group (like guild wars).
How is the respawning for enemies? If they do respawn i think it would be good if you made the respawn time long, unless there are too many players on one map, then you dynamically change the respawn to speed up. Even better would be if you had a way to deactivate enemy respawns or activate them at will, so ppl can go around killing things for fun or XP or farming and others can continue with the storyline without having to re-kill enemies (unless they leave the map and come back). Perhaps making instanced versions and MMO versions of all maps?
Can you also compare the combat between Tabula Rasa (I quit that one at level 30) and SGW? To me it doesn't really matter whether I have to have to aim at the monster or there is auto-aim or complete auto-lock, what really matters is the complexity of the combat. For me, the more complex the combat is the better (I mean more complex than current MMOs), not in terms of how many buttons (eg. skills, spells, abilities, blah) I get but in terms of different types of actions I can perform (eg. mini games during combat to help other party members or me with their button mashing) and in terms of having me pay attention to what the enemy is doing rather than pressing the same buttom combos again and again (eg. enemy does one thing so I have to act differently from if the enemy did something else). I thought Age of Conan might have some interesting combat mechanic (button combos are required to perform a certain skill) but it's not in-depth enough, since the combos are always the same and there is no counter-attack mechanic so I'm still basically mindlessly pressing the same combination buttons again and again. Tabula Rasa's combat mostly was telling my avatar to attack this creature and press the attack button till it's dead and depending on the creature type I would change weapons that deal more effective damage against them (sometimes certain type of damage they are immune to). It's very simple combat and got very boring quickly when going solo. I hope SGW's combat system is more in-depth to all the other MMOs out there, because to me they are all too shallow and the later levels just spam you with more skills (ala more buttons) and most of these skills are status affecting types rather than action-oriented effects. I think even if the basic combat is stale you can make the combat very good if you give skills that do very interesting things, rather than doing some type damage (AOE, DOT, direct damage,) or status ailments or buffs. The more viable options you have in a combat situation the longer the experience will stay fresh. Sorry for this long post, next time I'll just ask one question and let you answer it before I ramble on.