Why do you like WoW?

[Treesh]

I thought that it'd be fun to enter a fantasy world, so to speak. I don't know what it is, but I never seem to get the same feel of immersion as when I read a book or even play a pen & paper RPG. Perhaps it's different in the RPG servers. Where I played, there was far too much things that reminded me of it being just a game (stupid people, respawning of monsters [I should probably elaborate here], inane quests etc) .[right][snapback]65815[/snapback][/right]

It's not really different on the RP servers either, although to be fair, I stopped playing on them when I saw how little RP was actually done on the servers and no, I'm not talking about lack of Middle English-type speech. In fact, there was too much of that. This is World of Warcraft. Do you hear the NPCs using that type of language? Did you hear it in any of the WarCraft games? No. Why in the world would you think that it fits in World of Warcraft as roleplaying then?! But I'm digressing.

It really isn't immersive for me either. Oh there are the occasional flashes, but nothing really great. Maybe if the crafting was better, or if you were allowed to be a crafter only, that would improve for me. Maybe if you could actually affect the world through questing or crafting, the immersion would improve. As it is right now, it's really not an immersive game to me. It's more of a hack-n-slash where I have to deal with a lot of people.

The social aspect is one of the main attractions in WoW and MMORPG's in general, I would think. That's one aspect that doesn't appeal to me (I don't get along with people generally and am somewhat of a hermit) so I'm better off playing single player RPG's with well-written stories.[right][snapback]65815[/snapback][/right]

Despite my ever so frequent cries of "I hate people" when I'm playing, we actually bought it partly because of the social aspect of it and partly because it doesn't completely suck. GG and I knew a lot of people who were going to play it and we wanted to continue playing games with them so we bought it. The hack-n-slash is fun enough and the UI isn't that horrible. I used to think it was really bad, but then I beta tested Wish before they pulled the plug on the project. Now, I appreciate WoW's UI much more. :) The crafting is severely lacking in my opinion, but if the need to craft things gets too great, I bust out the construction set editor for Morrowind and go to town. :)

And there's absolutely nothing wrong with just playing good singleplayer games. I still enjoy Morrowind and its expansions, but I also like to spend time interacting with my husband and my friends/buddies so I like to have multiplayer options as well.

The reason I wrote this is because I'd like to hear what is it that you like about WoW, why do you play it? What makes it fun? What am I missing? I certainly don't mean to mock WoW or its fans. Anyway, I only played it to lvl 20, is the real fun in high levels and if so, what would that be? I have limited free time, why should I spend it on playing WoW instead of reading for example?

(Why can't I express my thoughts better?)
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If you have limited free time (as so many people do), I can't really think of any support for spending it playing WoW instead of reading or any other hobby that you enjoy. MMORPGs are definitely not for everyone, and they really aren't the same as RTS games either, even WarCraft3. You gave it a try, found out you didn't like it, there's no harm in that. I hated WoW after I tried the first US stress test, absolutely hated it, but since Tal was in closed beta he was able to keep me apprised of the changes made to the parts of the game I hated the most so I gave it another try when the next stress test and then open beta came around. Enough had changed between the first stress test and open that I no longer felt it totally blew. Since Europe's beta testing seems to be basically the same as US release (with some early preview of things), I think it's probably a better litmus test to see if you will enjoy it or not than what I tested.