Originally posted by Spiider Most profitable . yes. Best ever... define best. If you ask me I would say wow sucks but what do I know, I play sandboxes and not theme parks and hate holding hands.
I sure do miss for me the best sandbox ever, pre-nge SWG!
That is really the point to my original post. Telling my story and unique experience with WOW. Not just as a game but a feeling WOW gave me. Anyone who thinks my thread was a serious attempt at proving WOW is the best mmo ever for everyone kind of missed the point of my story and experience. The feeling I describe in my original post people may have had with other mmos. I bet a lot of people have felt the same way about EQ and SWG. I actually had hope this thread would be less about proving WOW was the best but was a format for others to tell why they felt there favorite mmo was best ever.
Vanilla WoW gave me a lot of good times and some real life nightmare's. It showed me that I'm susceptible to video game addiction. I almost lost my marriage over it, put things in perspective.
Originally posted by Spiider Most profitable . yes. Best ever... define best. If you ask me I would say wow sucks but what do I know, I play sandboxes and not theme parks and hate holding hands.
I sure do miss for me the best sandbox ever, pre-nge SWG!
if SWG hadnt been destroyed by SOE, then i probably never would have played WoW, but SWG was never that huge of a game, it was very much a niche game much as Eve is, and SW;TOR is likely to be, or any game these days tbh, i don't see any game really having the mass appeal of WoW, as it used to be, because way back then, there just wasnt that much to choose from, these days there are a huge amount of games to choose from and so players are more 'split' between them, eventually WoW will fade down to the same level of other MMO's not because its failing as such, its just that players now have so many games to choose from that there will always be something 'new' which is often a fair replacement for 'exciting' at least for a while
Then suddenly it began to be heard of and became a real popular culture phenomenon. It became more then just a game only us computer nerds knew. For many WOW became the first ever mmo and a barometer be which all life would be compared. Many of us in the know who put years into other mmos seemd to take offense to this.
I will just point out, I noticed that you measure game value also by its popularity, and I would say this is wrong approach. Unhealthy food is also popular, millions of people eat it and you know there is nothing good about it. I would say WOW is like a KFC of gaming... And the hate isn't always out of jealousy.
Everything else you wrote is just personal tastes, feelings and nostalgia. I can go in Azeroth now and I wouldn't feel s*it, so what you wrote doesn't really bring anything new or useful for me or for anyone on the forum.
If you would want to go more objectively about that, picking best mmo ever is like saying bananas are better than oranges... some people like bananas, some oranges, the genre is to diverse to do any comparisions.
Too bold a statement. Nobody knows what the state of MMO and computertech will be in 10 years time. It's a very good MMO, still is although I'm totally bored with it, but the best ever... A bit of a childish remark.
It's incredibly well made and well managed for an MMO, I think that is a big part of it.
The quests that almost make you feel you're not doing the same thing over and over. The way it guides you from zone to zone, keeping the experience fresh. The world itself is designed fabulously, no space is wasted, no part of it is boring.
While my favourite MMORPG is still pre-cu Star Wars Galaxies because of it's depth, in terms of overall design quality it never held a candle to WoW.
Then suddenly it began to be heard of and became a real popular culture phenomenon. It became more then just a game only us computer nerds knew. For many WOW became the first ever mmo and a barometer be which all life would be compared. Many of us in the know who put years into other mmos seemd to take offense to this.
I will just point out, I noticed that you measure game value also by its popularity, and I would say this is wrong approach. Unhealthy food is also popular, millions of people eat it and you know there is nothing good about it. I would say WOW is like a KFC of gaming... And the hate isn't always out of jealousy.
Everything else you wrote is just personal tastes, feelings and nostalgia. I can go in Azeroth now and I wouldn't feel s*it, so what you wrote doesn't really bring anything new or useful for me or for anyone on the forum.
If you would want to go more objectively about that, picking best mmo ever is like saying bananas are better than oranges... some people like bananas, some oranges, the genre is to diverse to do any comparisions.
You could not be more wrong. I do not judge a game by it's popularity. When you read my original post the last paragraph talks about why WOW is "The Best" it is a totally personnel reason. The two sentences you quote are clearly a bit sarcastic. What I was pointing out was that WOW transcended the typical definition of a game it grew to pop culture status and that that actually bothered a lot of us old school mmo players.
I am surprised a few missed the point of my post. I was not trying to sell this on you or convince anyone WOW had to be the best mmo ever for you. I was obviously not trying to be objective. You are correct that I was talking about personal tastes and nostalgia. You assume I was trying to sell WOW to people. Nope, I was trying to get people to talk about wow and what they feel is their "best" mmo by using a title that might get people to read. Sorry I did not make that clearer in my post. I just figured it was obvious. It does not matter to me that no one else feels WOW is the best. This was not a pole it was a account of my realization WOW was a bit more then a game to me.
Originally posted by Cliff1963 Too bold a statement. Nobody knows what the state of MMO and computertech will be in 10 years time. It's a very good MMO, still is although I'm totally bored with it, but the best ever... A bit of a childish remark.
Did you read my original post or just the title to the thread. Read my original post not just the title and you may feel a bit differently about why I started the thread. I used the term "best ever" in connection to this feeling I had that transcended WOW being just a game. Do I think everyone should feel the same? No, I had hoped others could relate to my experience and post if they have had a similar connection to WOW or their "best ever" mmo. I am not trying to sell you on the idea the WOW should be your "best ever"
As to the future yea, it will be awesome to see how mmos develop. I would bet in a total different direction then any of us can predict.
Originally posted by Spiider Most profitable . yes. Best ever... define best. If you ask me I would say wow sucks but what do I know, I play sandboxes and not theme parks and hate holding hands.
I sure do miss for me the best sandbox ever, pre-nge SWG!
if SWG hadnt been destroyed by SOE, then i probably never would have played WoW, but SWG was never that huge of a game, it was very much a niche game much as Eve is, and SW;TOR is likely to be, or any game these days tbh, i don't see any game really having the mass appeal of WoW, as it used to be, because way back then, there just wasnt that much to choose from, these days there are a huge amount of games to choose from and so players are more 'split' between them, eventually WoW will fade down to the same level of other MMO's not because its failing as such, its just that players now have so many games to choose from that there will always be something 'new' which is often a fair replacement for 'exciting' at least for a while
It is fun to speculate as to what form the "new" will take. I hope Wildstar can offer a bit of the new. However I do not see much on the horizon so at least for awhile longer WOW will be my "Best Ever". I be honest pre-nge SWG was possibly the "best ever"
I think Vanilla/TBC WoW could have attempted to claim that title. But other MMO's could have competed for that one in different areas (UO, EQ1, DaoC, SWG). Problem is, all these games are very different and comparing them isn't quite fair. I believe WoW was the best in its style of game, and DaoC was the best in its style of game.
I believe currently, the best MMO on the market is EVE no matter how you slice it.
Personal preference really shouldn't factor in. Someone out there likes Mortal Online but it's still a poor product and that's apparent to anyone.
Favorite MMO: Vanilla WoW Currently playing: GW2, EVE Excited for: Wildstar, maybe?
I myself like you don't care for the way the gameplay and such has changed so i haven't played it as much as i used, i am somewhat in the middle of you and people who care only for gameplay...i used to be one of the people in BC who everybody knew as i sat outside SW and in goldshire and just dueled 24/7, i wasn't anywhere near the best but i was good enough to have around a 2 to 1 win/loss duel ratio, and knowing everyone gave the game itself a sense of community knowing back then i could log in after school and see all my friends (and enemies) sitting on the fence. i completely understand what you're talking about but for me being somewhere in the middle...today's horrible community along with gameplay changes just outweighed that feeling for me and many of my old friends, whom of which many now are playing FF14 atm...so i have to disagree that it is the best mmo ever, if you were to ask if it WAS the best mmo id agree 100%
I doubt it... Perhaps for a selective young crowd it may have been. I hated it. Community was terrible...
Everquest 1 was IMHO (1999-2004). With the graphics never evolving they lost the ability to have been so much more,
I have to disagree with you on your narrow categorization that a selective group of the young crowd would think WOW was good. I am 54 years old and play in a guild that has a number of players over 60 and most in my guild are over 30. I find over all the WOW community is pretty good and as far as all the nonsense that goes on with a huge player base that has a lot of immature players, I simply ignore it, not an issue in my day to day in game socializing and game play.
I find Lotro does a much better job of maintaining that MMO feeling than WoW does these days. So it's a no from me. Being the best is all relative to taste anyway. Some people like merlot, some people shiraz.
I think Vanilla/TBC WoW could have attempted to claim that title. But other MMO's could have competed for that one in different areas (UO, EQ1, DaoC, SWG). Problem is, all these games are very different and comparing them isn't quite fair. I believe WoW was the best in its style of game, and DaoC was the best in its style of game.
I believe currently, the best MMO on the market is EVE no matter how you slice it.
Personal preference really shouldn't factor in. Someone out there likes Mortal Online but it's still a poor product and that's apparent to anyone.
....Darnassus I looked at the landscape and listen to the music and I felt like I was home again! I simple peace and joy settled over me. I forgot the heart break of my father's recent death. I forgot about all the doctors, pills, and life style changed forced on me since my heart attack. I forgot about the stress at work and my daily life. I was in Azeroth and home! No other mmo has ever done that for me. So I will answer my own question "could WOW be the best mmo ever?" Yes it is!
Great closure of op and probably reason I also love so much wow. Whenever i return (after months of absence, no matter how much I love some game I need detour to keep it fresh) I get that feeling "I'm home!" :-) Only other game I have played (and I'm beyond 50) and gives me same feeling is swtor. As long this two exists all my gaming needs for my free time are covered. :-))
No... as much as I had enjoyed it, I feel other games have executed things better then WoW has. That being said, if your looking at the long term as far as say updates or things the company has done for the game, I feel its quite easy to say 'no' in terms of its progressively bad step after bad step, all of which is oozing a bad style of MMO that other games oddly try to copy, or at least at one point they did.
I would say though that wow itself was ONE of the best mmos ever. It has managed to push the fold on gameplay, despite having practically little in terms of 'original' content, much of what it has being taken from other sources and refined for their own game. Not the best one out there I feel, but it deserves recognization for finding a way to make MMos more casual... even if today it has taken it 10 steps way to far over the edge in that regard (arguably something that happened during BC or relatively early in Wotlk, particularly at TOC).
In short: No, but it does deserve to be ONE of the best mmos ever, even if many of its recent expansion/design choices have been very poor.
If you are talking about the feels for WoW then its like religion. Why do people choose or stay with certain religions since a lot are similar? Its because of the feeling they have with that religion or concept.
You want to know why you have that feeling? Are you asking people to pick at your brain to understand how it works?
Maybe you like the shades of green, and the color palette with the art style. Or you like warcraft from before. Maybe the voices trigger a memory in you and wow has iconic voice actors that bring up great nostalgic memories. Or maybe the whole thing is nostalgia and it was your first mmo. So you want us to guess or do you want to share with us?
Nice playing with you.
Write bad things that are done to you in sand, but write the good things that happen to you on a piece of marble
Best Game Experience?.... That's mostly subjective
Best combat?..... not really
Most content?..... By a long shot
Most immersive?.... No
Best story..... Not really (read Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn by Tad Williams blizzard stole the story whole sale)
Will wow go down as the greatest MMO of all time?..... I would imagine. Simply because it was WoW that MADE modern MMO gaming what it is(for better or wosre). It has transcended being a simple "game" an become and entire subculture. A way of life for many people.
I'd go along these lines.
If we were to select the best mmo of all times, we would need to look at many factors.
Obviously, personal subjectivity that many have already shown in this thread, has no place in here, except if you declare it like OP did.
I too don't really like to play WoW. I checked it recently and I played it a lot in vanilla but learned I can't digest the gear treadmill too well. I have other personal all time favourites...
Still, it's really easy to agree WoW is king of MMOs and the greatest one out there in many ways.
There have been some interesting responses to what was really a story to illustrate my unique connection to WOW.
Let's look at it this way. I am a big film nut I have about 700 films in my collect. I am also an artist and an art professor at a small college. So I come to film and games as art but also entertainment, just as I do mmos. The film "Citizen Kane" is routinely named the best film of all time, almost by default, in list after list. This is for many reason's but mostly because it changed the way films were made and appreciated. I use to play a lot of console games until I got hooked on mmos. In the hearts of many, "Ocarina of Time" is considered to be the world's best video game, not just because it had one of the best story lines, but the fact that it changed the face of video-gaming forever, it introduced us to the concept of "open world". The Ocarina of Time format has influenced many games later, too, so it left an indelible mark in video gaming history. Both "Citizen Kane" and "Ocarina of Time" where not the first of their genre and both borrowed from the past but things were not the same after.
This brings us to WOW. If we bring the same criteria to mmos when searching for arguably the best mmo of all time, it seems to me there is no other choice, with the possibility of Everquest, to hold the title of best ever mmo then World of Warcraft. WOW has had the biggest impact right or wrong on the mmo world since it's release in 2005. We might change the word best to most important, influential, or a number of similar comparisons but regardless of your feelings about WOW no other mmo has attracted so many players, no other mmo has been so familiar to the general populous, heck even my 85 year old mother know of WOW, and not because I play it.
World of Warcraft like Citizen Kane, Ocarina of Time, and ketchup forever changed things. The mmo world will never be the same. It is bigger, better, and with more choice then ever due to one game and one game alone and that is World of Warcraft. Like it or not that is the reality of the mmo scene. Even if you hate WOW but love mmos you need to offer a humble salute to WOW because if your best ever MMO happened after 2005 it was developed by it's creators with the dream to be another WOW. I do not like ketchup but I acknowledge the world is a better place because of it.
Originally posted by Cliff1963 Too bold a statement. Nobody knows what the state of MMO and computertech will be in 10 years time. It's a very good MMO, still is although I'm totally bored with it, but the best ever... A bit of a childish remark.
Did you read my original post or just the title to the thread. Read my original post not just the title and you may feel a bit differently about why I started the thread. I used the term "best ever" in connection to this feeling I had that transcended WOW being just a game. Do I think everyone should feel the same? No, I had hoped others could relate to my experience and post if they have had a similar connection to WOW or their "best ever" mmo. I am not trying to sell you on the idea the WOW should be your "best ever"
As to the future yea, it will be awesome to see how mmos develop. I would bet in a total different direction then any of us can predict.
First of all, yeah, I read your post the first time. But because of your reply, I read it again. I can understand and even relate (I was fighting cancer when I came in contact with WOW, got disabled and playing WOW made me forget the terrible ordeal I was going through) to the situation and experience you were in when you played WOW. But that makes it a very PERSONAL experience, like I had and I'm still looking back with a great feeling about WOW. Was it the best MMO I played until now... Yes. Some disagree, most will agree. Sure there are players who will say it's 'the best ever', but although I agree with a lot you wrote in your OP, I have problems with the word EVER, imho it's something nobody can use in regard to a still evolving sort of game. And if you feel it's the best ever, they are your feelings about it, I can only respect those feelings.
In my opinion that would be FFXI, played for 7 years. Tried WoW for a month and never turned back, to this day WoW clones can't keep me for longer than a few months. FFXI was a masterpiece and there is nothing like it in existence.
Population numbers mean nothing to me, there are millions of people out there that watch Kardashians* and Honey Boo Boo.
Whilst WoW has a lot more content than many new releases (which is unsuprising as the game has been running for some time) there are MMOs out there with more content (EQ still has more content for example). I wouldn't be suprised if there were a lot more with comparable, or more content than WoW, however they wouldn't have the same level of polish.
Comments
I sure do miss for me the best sandbox ever, pre-nge SWG!
Vanilla WoW gave me a lot of good times and some real life nightmare's. It showed me that I'm susceptible to video game addiction. I almost lost my marriage over it, put things in perspective.
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
if SWG hadnt been destroyed by SOE, then i probably never would have played WoW, but SWG was never that huge of a game, it was very much a niche game much as Eve is, and SW;TOR is likely to be, or any game these days tbh, i don't see any game really having the mass appeal of WoW, as it used to be, because way back then, there just wasnt that much to choose from, these days there are a huge amount of games to choose from and so players are more 'split' between them, eventually WoW will fade down to the same level of other MMO's not because its failing as such, its just that players now have so many games to choose from that there will always be something 'new' which is often a fair replacement for 'exciting' at least for a while
I will just point out, I noticed that you measure game value also by its popularity, and I would say this is wrong approach. Unhealthy food is also popular, millions of people eat it and you know there is nothing good about it. I would say WOW is like a KFC of gaming... And the hate isn't always out of jealousy.
Everything else you wrote is just personal tastes, feelings and nostalgia. I can go in Azeroth now and I wouldn't feel s*it, so what you wrote doesn't really bring anything new or useful for me or for anyone on the forum.
If you would want to go more objectively about that, picking best mmo ever is like saying bananas are better than oranges... some people like bananas, some oranges, the genre is to diverse to do any comparisions.
It's incredibly well made and well managed for an MMO, I think that is a big part of it.
The quests that almost make you feel you're not doing the same thing over and over. The way it guides you from zone to zone, keeping the experience fresh. The world itself is designed fabulously, no space is wasted, no part of it is boring.
While my favourite MMORPG is still pre-cu Star Wars Galaxies because of it's depth, in terms of overall design quality it never held a candle to WoW.
You could not be more wrong. I do not judge a game by it's popularity. When you read my original post the last paragraph talks about why WOW is "The Best" it is a totally personnel reason. The two sentences you quote are clearly a bit sarcastic. What I was pointing out was that WOW transcended the typical definition of a game it grew to pop culture status and that that actually bothered a lot of us old school mmo players.
I am surprised a few missed the point of my post. I was not trying to sell this on you or convince anyone WOW had to be the best mmo ever for you. I was obviously not trying to be objective. You are correct that I was talking about personal tastes and nostalgia. You assume I was trying to sell WOW to people. Nope, I was trying to get people to talk about wow and what they feel is their "best" mmo by using a title that might get people to read. Sorry I did not make that clearer in my post. I just figured it was obvious. It does not matter to me that no one else feels WOW is the best. This was not a pole it was a account of my realization WOW was a bit more then a game to me.
Did you read my original post or just the title to the thread. Read my original post not just the title and you may feel a bit differently about why I started the thread. I used the term "best ever" in connection to this feeling I had that transcended WOW being just a game. Do I think everyone should feel the same? No, I had hoped others could relate to my experience and post if they have had a similar connection to WOW or their "best ever" mmo. I am not trying to sell you on the idea the WOW should be your "best ever"
As to the future yea, it will be awesome to see how mmos develop. I would bet in a total different direction then any of us can predict.
It is fun to speculate as to what form the "new" will take. I hope Wildstar can offer a bit of the new. However I do not see much on the horizon so at least for awhile longer WOW will be my "Best Ever". I be honest pre-nge SWG was possibly the "best ever"
I think Vanilla/TBC WoW could have attempted to claim that title. But other MMO's could have competed for that one in different areas (UO, EQ1, DaoC, SWG). Problem is, all these games are very different and comparing them isn't quite fair. I believe WoW was the best in its style of game, and DaoC was the best in its style of game.
I believe currently, the best MMO on the market is EVE no matter how you slice it.
Personal preference really shouldn't factor in. Someone out there likes Mortal Online but it's still a poor product and that's apparent to anyone.
Favorite MMO: Vanilla WoW
Currently playing: GW2, EVE
Excited for: Wildstar, maybe?
I myself like you don't care for the way the gameplay and such has changed so i haven't played it as much as i used, i am somewhat in the middle of you and people who care only for gameplay...i used to be one of the people in BC who everybody knew as i sat outside SW and in goldshire and just dueled 24/7, i wasn't anywhere near the best but i was good enough to have around a 2 to 1 win/loss duel ratio, and knowing everyone gave the game itself a sense of community knowing back then i could log in after school and see all my friends (and enemies) sitting on the fence. i completely understand what you're talking about but for me being somewhere in the middle...today's horrible community along with gameplay changes just outweighed that feeling for me and many of my old friends, whom of which many now are playing FF14 atm...so i have to disagree that it is the best mmo ever, if you were to ask if it WAS the best mmo id agree 100%
I have to disagree with you on your narrow categorization that a selective group of the young crowd would think WOW was good. I am 54 years old and play in a guild that has a number of players over 60 and most in my guild are over 30. I find over all the WOW community is pretty good and as far as all the nonsense that goes on with a huge player base that has a lot of immature players, I simply ignore it, not an issue in my day to day in game socializing and game play.
DaoC was an awesome game!
Great closure of op and probably reason I also love so much wow. Whenever i return (after months of absence, no matter how much I love some game I need detour to keep it fresh) I get that feeling "I'm home!" :-) Only other game I have played (and I'm beyond 50) and gives me same feeling is swtor. As long this two exists all my gaming needs for my free time are covered. :-))
No... as much as I had enjoyed it, I feel other games have executed things better then WoW has. That being said, if your looking at the long term as far as say updates or things the company has done for the game, I feel its quite easy to say 'no' in terms of its progressively bad step after bad step, all of which is oozing a bad style of MMO that other games oddly try to copy, or at least at one point they did.
I would say though that wow itself was ONE of the best mmos ever. It has managed to push the fold on gameplay, despite having practically little in terms of 'original' content, much of what it has being taken from other sources and refined for their own game. Not the best one out there I feel, but it deserves recognization for finding a way to make MMos more casual... even if today it has taken it 10 steps way to far over the edge in that regard (arguably something that happened during BC or relatively early in Wotlk, particularly at TOC).
In short: No, but it does deserve to be ONE of the best mmos ever, even if many of its recent expansion/design choices have been very poor.
what's your criteria for being 'the best'?
Financially? population? content?
"going into arguments with idiots is a lost cause, it requires you to stoop down to their level and you can't win"
If you are talking about the feels for WoW then its like religion. Why do people choose or stay with certain religions since a lot are similar? Its because of the feeling they have with that religion or concept.
You want to know why you have that feeling? Are you asking people to pick at your brain to understand how it works?
Maybe you like the shades of green, and the color palette with the art style. Or you like warcraft from before. Maybe the voices trigger a memory in you and wow has iconic voice actors that bring up great nostalgic memories. Or maybe the whole thing is nostalgia and it was your first mmo. So you want us to guess or do you want to share with us?
Nice playing with you.
Write bad things that are done to you in sand, but write the good things that happen to you on a piece of marble
I'd go along these lines.
If we were to select the best mmo of all times, we would need to look at many factors.
Obviously, personal subjectivity that many have already shown in this thread, has no place in here, except if you declare it like OP did.
I too don't really like to play WoW. I checked it recently and I played it a lot in vanilla but learned I can't digest the gear treadmill too well. I have other personal all time favourites...
Still, it's really easy to agree WoW is king of MMOs and the greatest one out there in many ways.
There have been some interesting responses to what was really a story to illustrate my unique connection to WOW.
Let's look at it this way. I am a big film nut I have about 700 films in my collect. I am also an artist and an art professor at a small college. So I come to film and games as art but also entertainment, just as I do mmos. The film "Citizen Kane" is routinely named the best film of all time, almost by default, in list after list. This is for many reason's but mostly because it changed the way films were made and appreciated. I use to play a lot of console games until I got hooked on mmos. In the hearts of many, "Ocarina of Time" is considered to be the world's best video game, not just because it had one of the best story lines, but the fact that it changed the face of video-gaming forever, it introduced us to the concept of "open world". The Ocarina of Time format has influenced many games later, too, so it left an indelible mark in video gaming history. Both "Citizen Kane" and "Ocarina of Time" where not the first of their genre and both borrowed from the past but things were not the same after.
This brings us to WOW. If we bring the same criteria to mmos when searching for arguably the best mmo of all time, it seems to me there is no other choice, with the possibility of Everquest, to hold the title of best ever mmo then World of Warcraft. WOW has had the biggest impact right or wrong on the mmo world since it's release in 2005. We might change the word best to most important, influential, or a number of similar comparisons but regardless of your feelings about WOW no other mmo has attracted so many players, no other mmo has been so familiar to the general populous, heck even my 85 year old mother know of WOW, and not because I play it.
World of Warcraft like Citizen Kane, Ocarina of Time, and ketchup forever changed things. The mmo world will never be the same. It is bigger, better, and with more choice then ever due to one game and one game alone and that is World of Warcraft. Like it or not that is the reality of the mmo scene. Even if you hate WOW but love mmos you need to offer a humble salute to WOW because if your best ever MMO happened after 2005 it was developed by it's creators with the dream to be another WOW. I do not like ketchup but I acknowledge the world is a better place because of it.
First of all, yeah, I read your post the first time. But because of your reply, I read it again. I can understand and even relate (I was fighting cancer when I came in contact with WOW, got disabled and playing WOW made me forget the terrible ordeal I was going through) to the situation and experience you were in when you played WOW. But that makes it a very PERSONAL experience, like I had and I'm still looking back with a great feeling about WOW. Was it the best MMO I played until now... Yes. Some disagree, most will agree. Sure there are players who will say it's 'the best ever', but although I agree with a lot you wrote in your OP, I have problems with the word EVER, imho it's something nobody can use in regard to a still evolving sort of game. And if you feel it's the best ever, they are your feelings about it, I can only respect those feelings.
In my opinion that would be FFXI, played for 7 years. Tried WoW for a month and never turned back, to this day WoW clones can't keep me for longer than a few months. FFXI was a masterpiece and there is nothing like it in existence.
Population numbers mean nothing to me, there are millions of people out there that watch Kardashians* and Honey Boo Boo.
WoW was definitely the most popular MMO.
'Most content?..... By a long shot'
Whilst WoW has a lot more content than many new releases (which is unsuprising as the game has been running for some time) there are MMOs out there with more content (EQ still has more content for example). I wouldn't be suprised if there were a lot more with comparable, or more content than WoW, however they wouldn't have the same level of polish.