As somebody who played WoW for several years, stopped playing two years ago, and has no intention of ever playing an MMO again... I have a hard time disagreeing with this assessment.

I have to agree even though I dislike the game as it turned my step brothers into boring, wow junkies for almost two years. Now they hate the game because they realize it consumed their lives.

Agreed.

what other games could even be considered? maybe halflife 2?

Possibly the best game I've ever played, and I played it a long time ago, which means I missed on years of improvements in the game.

lol

Game of the Decade in terms of money. Sure. In quality? I would require lots of swearing to tell you NO WAY IN HELL.

Played the demo and thought to myself "15 bucks a month to fetch skins for some bitch to give me a pie recipe? Yea right" then I uninstalled the game.  It lost to Paper Mario 64 to advance  for game of the decade on gamefaqs.

It's by far the game of all history, financially.

But I don't want it to be. WoW killed MMOs.

Byeeeeeeeeee!

I would say 6 to 6.5 million subscribers per month from China to Timbuktu speaks volumes of the World of Warcraft's quality.

Name any other game and I could tell you I could find it used in a bargain bin, while you could never find a copy of WoW in a used bargain bin.

Quality is relative in this sense because one man's Sinatra is another man's Screech to use a Dennis Miller term. I believe there have been other games which have influenced their genre, but none have absolutely ruled and innovated their genre like WoW has. Forget graphics, art, features and the like. Alan Wake like Myst is a "beautiful" game, but is an afterthought compared to Red Dead Redemption.

Thus forth, I honestly believe you can fuse the quantitative with the qualitative. We can argue all day which game is prettier, but once the numbers come in, then it is really hard to argue that 6 to 6.5 million monthly subscribers are a bunch of casual scrubs who would not know a good game from a bad one. I would side with the 6 to 6.5 million subscribers anyday of the week.

The Old Republic, Star Wars MMORPG, I predict will fail along the lines of the Conan, Warhammer and Final Fantasy MMORPGs. It will have it's few months of siphoning off players from WoW, but those 20 gigs of sound files ain't going to keep them playing.

Just consider that for a second. Final Fantasy is a longer living series than Warcraft, has just as many if not more fanatics who would buy Cloud dolls made up of glued twigs, and  it failed to gain the traction WoW has gained and maintained for 6 years (2004-2010). No, make that utterly failed. It may be that Final Fantasy 11 was a crappy game, but the love and following the Final Fantasy series had coming into it was pretty amazing, which made Final Fantasy 11's failure equally amazing to behold.