I enjoyed WoW while I played it. It's basically taken the various cookie cutters from popular MMORPGs and standardized them, kind of like how way back in the day England was using a billion systems of measurement that changed every year before somebody sat down and said "OK, we're doing it THIS way." WoW is a formula, like most modern MMORPGs, and it was one of the first to make it marketable to a playerbase wider than "people who are already interested in MMORPGs."
WoW, pre-Burning Crusade, was a fun time for me. It was a hard grind, to be sure, but there was this mystery of
so much to do. Of course, that was probably due to me being a dumb newbie. Still, there was a lot I never knew about, including how to get attuned to some of the high-level dungeons, events that happened only in those uber-elite level 60 areas, or even the holiday quests! It was this fantasy that one day I would be level 60 and know all of this stuff.
Burning Crusade came out and made all of that basically moot. It put all the interesting stuff in Outland, and then later went back to "streamline" the "getting to Outland" part of the game. Essentially, there were 58 levels that were just milking you for your time before you could get to all the stuff they put in for you to "enjoy." This really didn't sit right with me, a casual player who just wanted to have fun with the game, when all of their content was thrust into the 61-70 bracket. Karazhan became the new Dungeon of the Day. Apparently some very serious raiding guilds took this a little personally, since raiding had always been something that required a more-than-casual dedication to the game. On the surface it looks like anyone can get the same gear the hardcore raiders or PVPers can, but the reality is that the grind is even worse; casual players will generally be doing the Honor Farming or Karazhan PuGs themselves, not in a group of friends and skilled companions. Playing WoW is only a step above playing WoW
alone, but it is the fact WoW can be solo'd all the way up until you want to do some complicated level 70 stuff that makes it appealing to a lot of antisocial roleplayers like the people I used to play with.
With Wrath of the Lich King on the horizon, I can definitely say I won't be going back to WoW until every class in the game has a "Start at level 55" button. I'm tired of 1-58, because after getting two level 70 characters and a plethora of mid-40s after grinding through the same repetitious crap to get to Outland where the fun half of the game is, I want to get on with the rest of the content already. I don't want to have to re-level another character just so I can look around Northrend, go "Oh, cool," and then never play again because I'm not "serious enough" for 10-man Arthas raids.
