Quote Originally Posted by tehNihilist View Post
One thing I have noticed is WoW is a dirty word in the MMO community. So many people think it is pure crap, and seem blind to acknowledging what it did for the genre (good and bad). Fact is it made a HUGE impact on the genre, and pretty much all MMO's after it have tried to clone the experience in many ways and largely failed.

These days so many people play MMO's and games in general that we are not in the proverbial closet any more. But that within itself has had an interesting impact on the industry.
Having played a number of MMO's myself, I can comfortably say that WoW is not the best at any single feature ... but because it pretty good at including all/most of the features, by law of averages it comes out on top.

It doesn't have the best graphics
It doesn't have the best Auction/trade system
It doesn't have the best PvP
It doesn't have the best character skill configuration
It doesn't have the best looking armor/weaponry
It doesn't have the most expansive world
It doesn't have the best online community
It doesn't have the best profession/vocation system
etc.

BUT it does have all of those things all in one game, where other MMO's would always beat it in A feature, they would completely lack another 3.

I've played:

Guild Wars (all of them)
Lord of the Rings Online
Runes of Magic
Some or other weird thing
Aion
Age of Conan
Warhammer Online

WoW always tends to draw me back, be it for nostalgic reasons or otherwise...