So what you're tryin' to say is.
World of Warcraft is flat?
(Yes, I know it actually is all kinds of rectangles)

I am from the future and play Guild Wars 2.
Srs, i'm excited for it.

Lineage 3 imo.

That would be Aion.

the two MMOs i been playing are Fallen Earth and Champions online. i wont touch Aion because its a WoW clone with wings and a horrible grind.

I don't have much faith in F2P MMOs. The only one I really ever played lasted me about 10 minutes and I wasn't impressed with how hard it was to move your character.

I kind of came a bit late to the MMO party compared to the "veterans" out there. I've played EVE, WAR, and of course, WoW.

I pre-ordered WAR and was very impressed with it...until I got one of my characters past level 10. Then I realized that there was no way I could stick with the game. The starting zones are FANTASTIC, I really really love them. Most fun starting zones I think I've ever experienced. The problem is that once you get past level 10 you feel like you're playing a single-player game that occasionally gets hacked into by someone else (explaining why you occasionally see someone else running around and think, "Why are THEY here?!"). WAR has a lot of great concepts for a PvE game but they set out determined to make it a PvP (or "RvR") game so a lot of those great PvE concepts don't really reach their full potential. The PvP admittedly is pretty fun but it's not so fantastic that it makes up for the fact that the actual world seems to be a ghost town.

WoW was, well...WoW. Most of the criticisms against WoW seem to be in direct opposition to what makes it so popular. It, allegedly, is not hardcore enough (which probably helps it have over 10 million subscribers), has nothing to do with skill and everything to do with gear (which gives people something to work towards and makes them think that if only they can get geared up they'll be comptetent), and just generally suffers for balance issues and just isn't really stellar at anything. Not saying I agree with those points, but I mean obviously whatever Blizzard's doing is working for them and I found the game fun (imagine that!) so I don't really have anything to add to the conversation on that.

EVE intrigued me the most with its economy and whatnot but even though I was pretty obsessed for my 15-day free trial, I felt like I needed to take a whole college course just to figure the game out. That said, every time I see an advertisement for EVE they always have some new free expansion out that apparently has improvements of near divine magnitude so for all I know it could be the best game on the planet now. Actually just writing this post made me go start another 15-day trial, so I'll see how it goes after I'm done downloading.

But this doesn't answer the OP at all, so...

People who generally cry about how WoW sucks are:

1. Kids who've never played it.
2. They can't afford it.
3. Have an extremely short attention span that can only be satisfied by playing Halo 3.

Having to have played WoW for a looooong time (lolwut), I can safely tell you how intense it actually is. No competition? Arenas. No skills require huh? Well, if you ran into _ANY_ arena match with greens, you'd get stomped. So how do people gear up, you ask? Oh, funny thing, you play BGs (battlegrounds) to earn "honor points." WAIT, DOES THIS SOUND FAMILIAR? IP POINTS IN THE LoL STORE! And BGs are fun, with a combination of CTF, Attack and Defend, and well... "Grab the Flag in the middle and bring it back to your base." (LOL I LOVE EOTS)

Unbalanced? Well, let's just say Blizzard has been working on these issues as long as they've been out. Hell, even LoL here is unbalanced.

So yeah, if you've never tried it, give it a shot. Until then, don't talk **** and be a fanboy. If you still hate it afterwards, well, you can't have everything in the world, huh?

1: I'm 20 an I've tried it, 3x.
2: I can afford it plenty much, I just prefer paying for good products (Age of conan?)
3: I'd have a bigger attention span if the game was actually interesting but yeah.. Auto attack and casting a spell every 15 seconds with such .. awesome graphics .. isn't very attention worthy. Hell I find Ultimat Online 3d's graphics better than WoW.. And UO3D is ugly.