I've never tryed a realy good MMORPG, and half the games that claim to be are just places where you can show off your loot...
Last descent MMORPG I played was UO... grafics where nothing to get exited about, and the combat system sucked, but atleast there was a real world with people trading and small roleplaying comunities that formed towns and what not...
It was far from perfect, but it was still the best I've seen so far... looking forward to seeing age of conan though, although I remain sceptic.
And theres nothing strange about not finding MMORPG's interesting, especialy considering the recent tendency to focus on simple unoriginal quests and grinding and ofcourse big dungeons you can repeat to the point where you can do it in your sleep...
There's an article wich refers to WoW as a good example of methods to prevent a "negative vibe" from developing in the game world.
Basicaly their theory is : "Normal person" + "Anonymity" = "A-Hole"
And the way to prevent people from harrassing eachother is by a profanity filter and preventing people from talking with eachother or depend on eachother in any way.
I personaly disagree with a lot of what blizzard does... I like their RTS games and diablo was fun for killing time, but this is a genre where I personaly need to be part of a comunity of people that I like, I need this world to contain life and for people to interact. I just don't think a guild should be about repeating some huge dungeon untill you finaly aquire the items you need to get all the way through. I liked PvP in WoW because Blizzard are so damn good at balancing interesting abilities, but there was 3 PvP maps and it took them 1 year to make 1 more map, and trying to PvP on the world map just involved killing people that where fighting spawn. There where some big world map raids early on, but it quickly went out of style because the only gain was fun... there was no loot... (Besides the server had 25-30% horde, even the largest raids where never large enough)
Just saying WoW looked far more promissing at first, but as usual Blizzard went for the sure thing, keep people grinding for new gear and they'll keep paying...
So I guess most people want different things from a MMORPG, but WoW is just a MMOG IMO...
I think that by preventing people from talking or interacting you don't just prevent boored teenagers from harrassing people you also prevent everyone else from establishing a good comunity, and if you depend on others in a world and recieve help you may be more inclined to help others. UO had a learning curve that was way to steep, you where just tossed into it and had no clue, not saying this is a good thing, but it ment people needed to ask someone how to play, you where taught how to survive by random strangers and this made you want to help others... so because people needed eachother they where nice to eachother. (I know it may sound cynicle, but I don't realy think it is)
In WoW every man is his own island, noone cares about anyone because noone needs them and they don't need anybody, you're more isolated in WoW than in certain single player games.
