It's 3 seperate games.

1st) Leveling up to 70 is the grind/quest part, but honestly that isn't too bad.

2nd) Player vs Enviroment (PvE) is where you and 9 or 24 of your buddies get together to kill some bosses. Each boss is designed as an encounter and ranges from not too bad to very complicated. They call this raiding, and basically 25 people get together to progress through the content. Each fight has completely different mechanics etc.. Everyone has a role and people have to be on the ball.

3rd) PvP (Casual and Competitive) this is the other thing to do when you hit 70. They have battlegrounds for larger groups of players, and they have arenas where you have a 2v2, 3v3 or 5v5 team to compete. Sounds pretty dull, but the game has the same types of deep mechanics that CF does when it comes to PvP.

People talk about loot being the biggest reason why they don't try it, I just think that is unrealistic. Carrion Fields works because they have 100 or less playing in the world at any given time. If CF had 1000 people logged in at once, how would that affect the game? You think lowbie looting is bad when you have 50 players online? I could only imagine 10x that. CF implements PvP protection from griefing just like any game, they have their PK range and that limits PvP between skewed characters. WoW went another direction, and I think it works much more better on a large scale than CFs would. In WoW you progress as a character by improving your gear, and you do that by PvE raiding or PvP, either one takes work.

The only suggestion I can give is play with people you know, it makes the game entertaining. CF you have to pretend you don't know people, but in WoW it's much more casual.