What did WoW actually start doing first?

[Lilicia30]

WoW was the first to take the social aspects out of a genre of gaming based on social interaction.

This is eventually going to lead to WoW's downfall. MMOs are about community because you are in fact interacting with up to 2000 people every day on your server assuming its not low pop. The sad thing is you can level to 85 and get full heroic gear without ever saying a single word to another player. Thats just sad. The community in this game has all but gone the way of the dinosaurs. Right now BG chat is filled with nothing but "OMG you fail ass n00b L2play" or "Go /wrist IRL you are worthless" And LFD groups arent much better. All my alts are decked out in full heirlooms but i could care less if some true newbie is there in his armor with no stats. As long as hes asking questions and casting spells I could care less if the healer does more DPS because we were all new at one point. I turn 31 this year and while I loved all my leetspeak as I was owning people in Ultima Online back in '98 I just dont find this crap funny anymore. if WoW keeps going with its current crappy community of selfish assholes who only care about themselves many many people will start quitting as they mature and just dont want to put up with these obnoxious rude kids anymore.

[FlawlessSoul]

This is eventually going to lead to WoW's downfall. MMOs are about community because you are in fact interacting with up to 2000 people every day on your server assuming its not low pop. The sad thing is you can level to 85 and get full heroic gear without ever saying a single word to another player. Thats just sad. The community in this game has all but gone the way of the dinosaurs. Right now BG chat is filled with nothing but "OMG you fail ass n00b L2play" or "Go /wrist IRL you are worthless" And LFD groups arent much better. All my alts are decked out in full heirlooms but i could care less if some true newbie is there in his armor with no stats. As long as hes asking questions and casting spells I could care less if the healer does more DPS because we were all new at one point. I turn 31 this year and while I loved all my leetspeak as I was owning people in Ultima Online back in '98 I just dont find this crap funny anymore. if WoW keeps going with its current crappy community of selfish assholes who only care about themselves many many people will start quitting as they mature and just dont want to put up with these obnoxious rude kids anymore.

I hope I never have the misfortune of getting your LFD queues. I've had very few assholes in randoms that I've done. Some have been near silent, some have had complete idiots, but I've not had any assholes-for-the-sake-of-being-assholes ruining my play.

Also, PVP tends to attract two kinds of people - the kind that make a guild called JUSTIN BIEBER FANCLUB and the kind that are serious PVPers, not douchebagging morons running FotM comps. The former trashtalks from dawn 'til dusk, act like petulant five year olds, and have brains the size of walnuts. The latter is generally quiet because they're kicking your ass, and they don't feel the need to stop and chat.

[steale]

Things WoW did first:
Races like Elves, Goblins and Trolls
auctioneers
guild housing
action bars/keybinds
friend lists
pets
mounts

Fail. WoW didn't do anything at all on your list first. EverQuest had 4 different kinds of elves, as well as Troll and Ogre playable races.
The Nexus was, to my knowledge, the first player run auctionhouse in an MMO, though UO may have had a similar feature.

As has been stated before, all WoW did first was take what the other MMO's had done, combine the best of all of them, and make it more accessible (read: easier).

[FlawlessSoul]

(read: easier).

WoW began as a game that was easier to get into than other MMOs of the time, but just as hard to get to the end game. The major difference with WoW was that it removed the huge penalties for failing (like dying losing you a large chunk of experience, losing all your mats on crafts etc). That's not really making it easier, that's just removing a retarded mechanic of the game. If you fail, you fail. Games that then punished you for failing were not harder, since you already failed the skill check and died, they were just a masochistic waste of peoples time to get back to the place you were.

[Nurvus]

Games like L2, RFO are examples of how gear represents pretty much 100% of a character's power.
Unfortunately, that's how most games are and have always been.
Leveling to 300 isn't skill or harder - perhaps just more boring.
Choosing among 10000 builds isn't skill or harder - eventually the best combos are brought to light.

Grinding and Farming - Have never been qualities in games, imo.

The complexity of a character after all background choices are made - when you actually get to the fighting - is what matters now and forever.

After you've got all the gear you can, after all the theorycrafting, even if everyone is a clone of YOU in every aspect of the game's storable data, in WoW you can still outplay your opponent by far.

No matter how complex other games may seem, as many can argue DDO has alot of variety in skills/builds/etc, in the end the best builds are X, Y and Z, and the way to -use them- is very simple and obvious... - alot simpler than any spec in WoW.

People who complain WoW is easy, just haven't realized it was WoW who made YOU more skilled than you ever were in MMOs.
If you go back to some other MMORPG - any MMORPG - you will feel like it just doesn't push you as far as WoW ever did.

The only problem in WoW's "ease" has laid mostly in progression (how easy it is to obtain gear) AND/OR how undertuned some encounters may be regarding the gear availability.

That's the only thing Vanilla had "harder" than the subsequent expantions - the encounters were tightly tuned.
But that was also possible because the mechanics in them were easier... just more chaotic to manage 40 players.