Kinda broad question. People find games fun, and its an opinion, so its just something some1 else finds fun. I personally find the grind boring as fuck, but i still enjoyed some MMOs. I like part of the overall concept, that you go out into this preferably big world with a bunch of other people and kill stuff. I can't really say what would make a game like WoW appealing since i've never played it, and most other MMOs i joined i quit after i hit the level where it took pure grind to get half of the xp for the next, but i did play an MMO for quite a few years straight, Guild Wars, so for all its worth, here's what i found interesting about it:
-No real grind needed. Max level was 20, the first installment had the slowest leveling, but you still could get to max level through story missions alone and still be that level way before the final mission. The other 2 pretty much had you maxed out pretty early on.
-Focus was on skill builds. As opposed to level i mean; typically in an MMO your power was your level, if you are level 50, and followed a walkthrough of attribute assignment, no1 below your level should beat u, and no1 above it should lose to u. In GW, given your max level is so low, there was a lot more flexibility with the skills. You could redistribute your attributes anytime you were in a town, and skills belonged to attributes, so you could basically redesign your whole build whenever you liked, skills were separate from level, so even after you maxed out, you could find a town with new skills you liked better and keep modifying your character. There were also tons of skills per profession, well over a 100 i believe, so it was pretty fun to experiment around.
-Equipment variety. Every weapon skin had a max level version, and there were a lot of max level armors, all with same base stats that you could modify however you wanted. So basically you could pick whatever armor you liked without it hurting ur stats in the long run, which its something i would have liked to have in other MMOs. Also, since there were so many max armors, and each class had its own sets of armors, not everyone looked the same.
-Story. It has one, and not the "monsters attack, here follow these quests" kind, you even get cutscenes with voiced dialogue.
-Interesting classes. Aside from your standard picks, some where really damn interesting, the mesmer and ritualist were pretty cool and the assassin's had a pretty cool attack mechanism.
-Fully instanced. Meaning whenever u went out of town into an area, you would be in a copy of that area reserved for your party and it alone, no kill steal bs or anything like that.
-Interesting PvP. PvP had its own separate area with different arenas with different rulesets, some of which even affected the PvE maps. You could even make PvP-only characters that would start out at max level but could only be used in PvP. Skills were also balanced separately in PvP from PvE so that nerfing an op PvP skill won't make your build useless against a horde of PvE enemies.
-Other MMO-like features like guilds, alliances, collectibles, etc etc.
So i guess i liked it because it had a lot of un-MMO-like features. So maybe pure MMO isnt my thing either, but i can see why people would like a pure MMO, its a big fantasy world full of others like you where you can dick around all you want and (in most) take forever to hit your max potential. It's not my thing, but i can definately see where others would see the appeal.
) but I can do that in an MMO, I can heal people, summon stuff and all sorts of crazy and interesting things you'd need to buy several retail games to get all of.
