My first MMO experience was UO. That was also the best experience to date. Even so, I lost interest about the time Age of Shadows was released and haven't been back since. I moved on to Final Fantasy XI after that, despite the major differences in the two games. I've been a FF fan since I was a child, and Square has been THE company I respect more than any other out there, hands down. After burning out with FFXI, though, I still have yet to find a good game that I truly feel connected to. I've tried Vanguard, Tabula Rasa (which, despite several flaws, had some really cool design ideas), LOTRO, Warhammer, various F2Ps and others I can't recall. WAR was the closest thing to keeping me entertained since I'd never really experienced such an attempt at organized RvR. I was impressed at first, and I still have some fond memories, but the flaws are just too glaring.
When I finally broke down and submitted myself to the WoW trial, I was sorely disappointed. I had hoped that I had been wrong all those years, that just maybe there would be something of value to it since millions of people were glued to it. I played 2 days of the 10-day trial before I could no longer stand the railroad track, candy-coated version of the Warcraft world. I had hopes that the world from the RTS series (up to Warcraft II) would be more prominent, but they obliterated it with Warcraft III and WoW. The artsy, comical style, the silly dialogue, the babysitting; it was unbearable. Warcraft was a gritty, dark and fierce world. The conflict was bloody, the heroes were demented, the story was deep. Until they decided to re-market the franchise.
I have a lot of respect for WoW outside of it's gameplay and style. Blizzard has found a killer recipe for attracting new gamers to what was once an obscure and niche genre. Most major gaming publications didn't even have a section or a column about MMOs before World of Warcraft came along. As bad as it hurts to say it, WoW put MMORPGs on the map. Unfortunately, though, it is doing nothing to mature those new MMO gamers into respectable gamers and is giving many the impression that all MMOs are supposed to cater to their every whim. No one wants to be challenged anymore, it seems.
Everyone is saying that Aion is the "spiritual successor" to Lineage II, or is effectively L3. Well, that's all fine and good, but what if it turns out to be the game that moves the gamers who were introduced to MMOs through WoW into the next step of maturity? What if this is the game that brings us out of the moronic and self-destructive cesspool and takes this now massive community of MMOers to a new level? Is that an ambitious and likely overly-optimistic thought? Yeah, maybe it is. But it is time for the WoW kids (not every former WoW player is a "WoW kid," btw) to grow up, and what better way to do it than through a game that feels similar to WoW but introduces them to a whole new world?