Or you could troll message boards and blog comments to get some fun...

Fun is different to different people. If you've read Raph Koster's "Theory of Fun," he mainly posits that learning the ruleset of a game + achieving mastery over it = fun. It's sort of a half-Achiever, half-Explorer outlook of fun, which most can relate to.

It's not all the fun there is though. Years ago, I went through serious WoW-like burnout (climbing a gear ladder on a MUD, grinding out levels to be able to raid this and that - why bother?) and looked real close at why I was repeating the same horrible boring pattern out of habit.

Then I listed the stuff I found personally fun in no particular order, and went looking for games that matched it.

Immersion: Feeling like being in a game world, well-written quest text is a big part of it, load screens are quite tolerable, got to be nice storylines and lore, with a leaning towards realistic graphics over cartoony.

Combat: Big part of any MMO, helps if it feels visually exciting or fluid, innovative mechanics preferred, classes should ideally deviate from holy trinity and be easy to switch skills/roles.

Leveling/XP: Ideally, multiple ways to gather xp - quests, grinding, what-have-you. Soloability a MUST. Teaming should have interesting carrots to attract people to gather together.

Novelty/Newness: Innovative systems for whatever. New MMO smell means lots unknown and not all filed away in some gigantic wiki or database. New things to learn, new sights to see, new info bits to contribute - a "pioneers on the frontier" style that I love. So this guy might have rushed to max level, but I bet he doesn't know about (insert little cool secret)...mwa ha ha, etc.

Little wonder that I had the time of my life in CoX, GW and AoC. LOTRO was a passable WoW substitute since I'm still not touching the ten ton linear grind monster with a ten foot pole. DDO/Eve/Lineage/FFXI are alas, not my cup of tea. I missed the DAoC and EQ1&2 boat, unfortunately.