As someone who used to have a WoW problem and now and then relapses, it tickles me the same way Cookie Clicker does. It’s nice to see number go up.

Back when I was playing with my friends and the game was a little harder (BC & WotLK), there was a sense of shared accomplishment when overcoming difficult regions and raids.

There was a time when the community was the attraction, although I wouldn't say "the insanely large community", given that at the (for me anyway) best/peak WoW times, your specific community was the server, which was maybe a couple of thousand or so?

Around that sort of time you would encounter known groups/people, e.g. characters that had a reputation as extremely good in PvP etc.

Then along came the cross-realm stuff, and fairly quickly community ceased to matter, you just queue up, play, and move on.

Great for ease of play etc, terrible for community.

(Well, that was how I saw it anyway).

For many, it's an online third space. Cooperating to overcome shared challenges reinforces social ties. The game provides a weekly schedule of activities and new challenges quarterly.

My credentials: I played every expansion (but not every tier) since vanilla with the same group of people. I only stepped away in The War Within after family obligations and time zones got in the way.

Grind addiction aside, the gameplay was legitimately good. PvP was compelling, raiding was compelling, even the grind was pretty fun (especially compared to your usual free-to-play MMO).

Planning 40 man raids was a part time job. Everyone worked together to grind out materials for potions and stuff and you really had to work together on dungeons to get through them, whether that was acquiring better gear or practicing strategies. The payoff of working on a dungeon for a month and finally clearing a boss was so satisfying. It created real comraderie.

It's not WoW, but the thing that kept me playing City of Heroes for longer than I should have was a weekly game night where a group of us would get together and run characters that we only ran on those nights.

When news about the server code leak broke containment and the open servers started I was initially intrigued, but I discovered that playing with randos just wasn't as much fun.

It was a very forgiving and accessible MMO, one that really felt like playing diablo 2 on a persistent multiplayer world. That, and warcraft 3 was released not too long, and the Frozen Throne expansion the year before. So the setting and lore was fresh in people's minds.