I think it was similar to all the early MMO's. They were a platform to create a community in a time where that was hard to do in the real world. Back when I started playing Asheron's Call there were basically two "nerds" on my school of like 1000 students and the town computer club had 5 members. It wasn't like today where you can easily find someone to play DnD or board games with and you couldn't really play video games online. Hell, how many people under 35 knows what the internet chatrooms were?

MMO's let you go online and be social and build communities. WoW did that really well back then. Eventually as things went on, MMO's got more and more tools that let you avoid building those communities. Like the dungeon finder in WoW. I think a lot of MMO's and games in general turned to letting peope get their dopamine fix from increasing numbers through RNG rather than being social.

I know people who stuck around with WoW because of the social communities they build. One of the guilds I was in 20 years ago still meets up in the real world, I know because one of my old friends still plays. I also know people who stuck around because of what is essentially the idle gambling. I became a jock of sorts back around the burning crusade release because I had to put a lot of focus into water polo training. Which meant I didn't do a whole lot "nerdy" stuff for a decade. Once I started doing "nerdy" things again it was easy to find people near me because everyone is a "nerd" these days.

There was a time when the community was the attraction, although I wouldn't say "the insanely large community", given that at the (for me anyway) best/peak WoW times, your specific community was the server, which was maybe a couple of thousand or so?

Around that sort of time you would encounter known groups/people, e.g. characters that had a reputation as extremely good in PvP etc.

Then along came the cross-realm stuff, and fairly quickly community ceased to matter, you just queue up, play, and move on.

Great for ease of play etc, terrible for community.

(Well, that was how I saw it anyway).

As someone who used to have a WoW problem and now and then relapses, it tickles me the same way Cookie Clicker does. It’s nice to see number go up.

Back when I was playing with my friends and the game was a little harder (BC & WotLK), there was a sense of shared accomplishment when overcoming difficult regions and raids.

For many, it's an online third space. Cooperating to overcome shared challenges reinforces social ties. The game provides a weekly schedule of activities and new challenges quarterly.

My credentials: I played every expansion (but not every tier) since vanilla with the same group of people. I only stepped away in The War Within after family obligations and time zones got in the way.

Planning 40 man raids was a part time job. Everyone worked together to grind out materials for potions and stuff and you really had to work together on dungeons to get through them, whether that was acquiring better gear or practicing strategies. The payoff of working on a dungeon for a month and finally clearing a boss was so satisfying. It created real comraderie.

Grind addiction aside, the gameplay was legitimately good. PvP was compelling, raiding was compelling, even the grind was pretty fun (especially compared to your usual free-to-play MMO).

It's not WoW, but the thing that kept me playing City of Heroes for longer than I should have was a weekly game night where a group of us would get together and run characters that we only ran on those nights.

When news about the server code leak broke containment and the open servers started I was initially intrigued, but I discovered that playing with randos just wasn't as much fun.

They were a social network before social networks and always available IM and the gameplay provided a reason to be in the game (and therefore available to socialise with) even if you were the first/only one there.

I mean, they also had their own gameplay appeal, but I think the current player pool of WoW+FFXIV+ESO+GW is probably a more accurate reflection of how widespread the appeal of them as pure games is, while the crazy numbers of 00s WoW were about the social network aspect.

It was a very forgiving and accessible MMO, one that really felt like playing diablo 2 on a persistent multiplayer world. That, and warcraft 3 was released not too long, and the Frozen Throne expansion the year before. So the setting and lore was fresh in people's minds.

30-player lobbies isn't exactly "massively" multiplayer though.

Well, yes. One day. To the point I have another eve without much of known issues sketched in my notebook, which is ofc nothing.

Can you please tell of what you disagree with?

The Fuel Rats are awesome people!

Yeah it made my day when I’d pop some T3 cruiser gang in wormhole space with my buddies.

It was substantially less fun when I was on the other side of that and got scanned down in my officer fit Archon and popped. Finally I said to myself “why am I doing this to myself?” and quit. My wife approved.