Nice post, and my feelings exactly.

I'm currently enjoying Aion, as I feel (so far) it has very fun PvP, but I'll be the first to admit that the game world feels incredibly tiny (compared to other MMO's).

It's not necessarily a bad thing for that specific game, as larger areas would likely thin out the population, resulting in PvP encounters occurring far less often, but it certainly feels like I'm just a part of a region, rather than a part of a world.