The most impressive aspect of WoW to me was just how well the game ran on commodity hardware at the time. EQ2 came out the same month and ran very poorly on top-of-the-line PCs. Vanguard beta hit a year later and it was nearly unplayable on anything but the most cutting edge of systems. I really think Blizzard's focus on performance optimization and UX had a very significant contribution to the success of WoW and widening the playerbase.
> "From a pure hardware side, we weren't prepared. From the standpoint of how fast people were getting to max level and are we going to have content in place for them; we weren't prepared. We never really experienced what it's like to be on a game that never ever ends," adds Pardo. "In a lot of ways everything starts the moment you launch, which none of us were really mentally or emotionally ready for the difference, because again a lot of us had shipped games and you go through that final moment where you launch this thing and it's finally out there. Honestly, the first two years of post-WoW development was really this perpetual state of 'Can we just catch up to the popularity of the game?'"<p>True for so many startups as well, where "max level/endgame" is the arrival of users with needs you didn't anticipate, whose momentum and confidence you rely on to present your brand in the marketplace. For every ounce of stress, though, there's two ounces of excitement, and that's its own fun.
Why & how WoW succeeded, in my opinion:<p>User Interface Customization using Lua.<p>Also, I think WoW indirectly taught a lot of developers about Taint checking ( <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taint_checking" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taint_checking</a> ) - something I still feel extremely bitter about missing from Javascript, replacing it with "Signed Script Policy" in retrospective seems like a bad idea, to the point where people re-invented it after it got removed, but still no community maintained implementation exists:<p><a href="https://github.com/phvogt/NoMoXSS" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/phvogt/NoMoXSS</a> (The paper for this has 579+3 citations [+3 because there exists a separate citation network due to Google Scholar being, well, Google Scholar: <a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=4323801493645906635" rel="nofollow">https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=4323801493645906635</a>]: <a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=9547351675563063950" rel="nofollow">https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=9547351675563063950</a>. Yet I don't see this kind of feature in any mainline javascript implementation.)<p><a href="https://github.com/idkwim/jsTaint" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/idkwim/jsTaint</a> (Different project, it seems)
"After leveling for a bit, you'd eventually drop down to gaining half of the experience that you'd normally gain. Players absolutely hated it. So Pardo flipped it around. The early, enhanced leveling was framed as the player gaining bonus experience, while the non-rested state was framed as normal, making players were much happier."<p>Love it.
I saw so many people drop out or destroy their relationships because of WoW.<p>I'm lucky the monthly fee was too much for me bacm in the days :/
My son and I played for years together. We got pretty competitive so when he leveled to 80 slightly ahead of me, I was pissed at him for several days!<p>Good times.<p>Oh, and seeing Ozzy live at Blizzcon was pretty sweet too.