Well I am complete newbie and have just started playing an adventurer. This is the first time I am playing a sci-fi game so any in game Help would be appreciated. My in game nick is Claspede. And I have another question, is the population like WOW, and is it a friendly community. Does this game require a lot of time?

Is there lots of char development? Is it grindy?

Is there any good fansite forum for the game where you can make friends since none of mine are playing this game?

Any help would be greatly appreciated

I have played WOW, Ragnarok, Flyff, and some other F2P games.

I would say 1200-1500 hours for lvl 1 to 200 and another 500 hours to 220.

It's an older game, so the quest system was an add on and it's not very mature compared to games like WoW. Unfortunately, that does make it grindy, but there is a lot of content in there. You can mix up what you do and avoid the grind to a degree.

It is a much smaller community than WoW, but it's generally a lot nicer than WoW. The community has shrunk to the point where teams can be hard to get. Best forum would be the one off the AO site.

There's the FAQ in this forum which also has links to other sites to get help from. RK2 (Rimor) has the largest population but the AO population isn't as big as other games such as WoW.

Regarding levelling how long it takes depends on if you have the expansions and how you play. With SL levelling is much faster then if you're willing to team you can move along quite well. Someone that really wanted to push things managed to do lvl 200 or maybe even lvl 220 in twenty-four hours of game time so how long it takes you depends a lot on how fast you want to level. Although your first chat will take some time as you don't know your way around and can't get at items as easily. A good Org will help you there.

Also this is a MMORPG, not a single player RPG. The idea of these types of games is that you can do whatever rather than follow some scripted routine of one quest after another like in single player RPGs. WoW isn't more mature, they just made levelling too easy and had it so you could solo up to cap before needing to do much anything with others. There are some quests and such you can do if you want to so as to gain some quest specific reward but you're not required to do any of that if you don't want to.