Gamespot's Australian bureau recently got their hooks into senior systems designer Andrew Griffin and picked his brain about AoC's 'wrap activities'. Here's a snip:
GS AU: Another common complaint of MMOs is grind. How will you go about making sure that monotony is out of the game?
AG: We have a relatively fast leveling speed--it's not slow, and it's more in the WoW type speed. We do give out a significant amount of XP via quests. So pure grinding with monsters isn't the most efficient way to level up. If you get a quest which takes a certain amount of time, you'll get the same amount of XP if you were just pure grinding at 100 percent efficiency for the same amount of time. You won't be sitting there just doing mindless grinds--you'll be doing interesting quests.
There's lots more so head over to the link above.