WoW was my first MMO that'd I'd gotten into. I'd played Ultima Online beforehand but it never really stuck on to me so I dropped it pretty fast. Anyway...a few months back, I got a little perturbed at the oodles of Anti-WoW posts that had come up. And indeed, all the reasons why X MMO was -so- much better.
So...what the hell, most of these games have got demos and free trials why not give it a shot? And so I did, started with Guild Wars, moved on to EVE, Dungeons and Dragons Online, City Of Heroes/Villains, Final Fantasy XI, Age of Conan, Star Wars Galaxies and even some freebies like Silkroad Online and Runescape and the like. And, while I found that each one offered something different and new from each other, I found that fundamentally these were all the same game.
They looked different on the outside. Boasted many interesting little hooks in order to differentiate themselves. But, in the end I came to the realisation that: You make an Avatar. You kill stuff. You collect stuff. You do quests/jobs/mission. You craft stuff. Whether through skills or levels your avatar gets better. Your avatar gets better stuff as you progress.
Now, that should be painfully obvious to anyone. But, the reason I bring this up is purely for the reason that it seems to be used as a general put down against MMO's, as if people are -surprised- they have to do all this.
As for how WoW fits into all this, from my own point of view, it's a safe game for me. I'd played the Warcrafts, I knew the background, I'd played many other games by Blizzard and respected them as a company. I guess, it's simply an issue of brand loyalty, it's the same reason I keep a close eye on anything Valve releases. That said, I know it's not perfect, but also know, having tried most of the others, that there isn't currently another MMO available that offers me anything I want, short of interesting features here and there that don't want to make me stick with them.
