As far as I'm concerned, my dislike from game the likes of WoW where social interaction is a large and fundamental aspect for the enjoyment of the game (and you can put in here all MMORPGs, MUDs and a large variety of online game), is exactly the fact that they end up providing life-like experience in which I have to put up with the "worst" our society has to offer. Whinning kiddos, rude and abusive people, ignorant brats, delusional admins, tyrannic and outright evil players, attention seekers, etc...
It goes without saying that other players may look at me and think that they will have to put up with my holier than thou attitude. I concede.
Regardless, I avoid all of the above types in real life. Thus, it is hard for me to actually draw any enjoyment from these games and conceive having to actually spend money for this. My personal experiences have been always a mixture of swooning over success, and aggravation over the idiocy that generally populates online gamming communities in large numbers.
I find online games where social interaction is not a premium factor, to be much more enjoyable. Online strategy and war games, and PBEM games have been my favorite types. Here players make a much better effort in concentrating on what matters, the game itself. Even in strategy/war games where diplomacy plays a major role the interaction is usually stripped of any social context.
However, this is obviously both a matter of personal taste (I always prefered strategy and war games), but also probably a matter of some social inepcy on my part when it comes to online gamming communities (trust me I'm otherwise perfectly normal in real life).
It's a shame this discussion got drifted towards this, though. It was becoming interesting when the argument was this notion that people are starting to find perfectly natural to pay regularly to keep playing a game. Especially considering that what is being offered is really not much different from what has been offered in the past at no additional cost.
It concerns me that this widespread acceptance is not being matched with trully innovative in-game technologies, but insteady simply the providing of more game elements. It's a gold pot for game developers and it adds nothing trully interesting for the game community, that hasn't been offered before for free.
