Warning

Personal opinions ahead.

WoW

This World of Warcraft game is a real problem for me. How can a game so obviously bad still be so popular!?

• It asks the player to repeat boring tasks amazingly frequently. Quests like "Get 10 bear claws", and then each bear only has a CHANCE of giving you ONE claw. Running around clicking special things. Delivering messages for someone. These things are stupid.
• Combat is based much more on the stats of the characters and his equipment than the skills of the players. You don't get better by becoming a better player, you do it by doing easier things until some numbers go up.
• Playing with your friends is really hard. It would take me weeks at least to get up to the levels they want to play at. And if they want to join me at low levels, we probably have like 15 minutes of walking before we can get near each other.
• Filler. Most of the content is not the least bit interesting, but you have to do a bunch of it to ever get to the interesting stuff.
• Equipment drops. Collecting random drops is not fun. Spending a bunch of time shopping for the right belt to increase your intelligence is just all kinds of stupid, too.
• Progress measured by how much killing you did. As opposed to actually overcoming challenges or figuring things out. Being rewarded mostly for time spent feels insulting, not rewarding.
• No Endings. That's annoying for me at least. I don't mean that there needs to be a final WoW boss after which you are done playing, but it needs some point at which it says hey you won or lost this section. Or you did this well at this task. The laundry list of quests that get checked off just doesn't do this for me for some reason. Maybe "No Closure" would be a better way to say it.
• Progress bars everywhere. Cool downs. I understand that's a tool they use to balance the game, but am I really supposed to like being made to wait? Non-RPGs manage to balance themselves just fine without cool downs or progress bars.
• Travelling. Come on. Have some respect for your player's time. Expecting him to sit there enjoying the scenery when he wants to play a game is silly.
• Monthly fee. I paid for non-MMOs once and I can play them online as many times as I want for as long as I want without additional fees. I see no reason it should be different for MMOs. And in fact there seems to be an awful lot of free-to-play ones.
• I've heard it argued that these complaints are only valid for the early game.
  • But why would I play though hours and hours of the boring game to get to the good parts? Mr. Owl is wise.
  • I've also heard the defense that this boring stuff is training that new players need to go through before they can have fun with the late game. That really is a BS defense, though:
    • If training is needed, it should train you with the actual kind of gameplay that the late game has.
    • It drags on much much much longer than it would need to for training purposes

I think it can all be summed up like this: While WoW does have fun things in it, it still goes out of its way to waste your time.

Most of the complaints are valid for RPGs in general and not just WoW. I think the Legend of Zelda series or Illusion of Gaia, and many other examples show that you can have epic stories, open worlds, and characters that get more powerful over time without the problems mentioned above.