WoW and SL not all there is to MMOs

While I whole-heartedly agree with WoW not being the end-all be-all...if it wasn't for this website continually mentioning it, I wouldn't even consider Second Life a -game-. It just seems...sad, which is reinforced by the simple fact that everyone that I've met that plays it (that will openly admit to it) act as though they are ashamed of the fact.

I agree with Ebon. SL is more like Myspace and Facebook with avatars. WoW is becoming more and more like the Fantasy version of SL now these days anyway. People spend most of their time in /2 and LFG.

I feel like your comparing apples and oranged when you get into a term as vague and vast as “virtual worlds”. At what point is something even considered comparable to its supposed competition? Is Second Life, a program that I’ve always considered more of a browser or tool than a game, even comparable to WoW? In function, form and purpose they’re entirely different.
Do xbox lives subs count as part of an mmo? Is Halo’s multiplayer a virtual world? Is an fps with traditional multiplayer but a tacked on auction house an mmo? Does persistence make something a virtual world? Does instancing not? Is it a virtual world when it has thousands of players or is it a “virtual world” when you have four people playing ninja turtles together online? They’re in a world, they’re socializing, and its online. How is that different than doing a dungeon run with your fiends in WoW or running a race with some buddies in facebook’s digipets online?
The truth is the term “mmo” has become more and more vague as of late. Most games these days have a strong multiplayer focus as well as a sense of online progression that would have been previously confined to this genre. To add to this confusion, a lot of mmo’s have pulled their complexity and “massiveness” back to the point where they more closely resemble a series of instanced scenarios than a sprawling seamless world populated with thousands of players simultaneously.
And now we’re fitting multiplayer flash games that run on social networks into this already ill-defined and somewhat imaginary digital phenomenon? If you ask me the term “virtual world” has become mute by this point and arguably, even the term “mmo”. We’re playing (and working) in an environment where every program and website is online and persistent; complete with its own span of socialization and change. The days when all we had were everquest, starcraft and goldeneye are long gone. It’s time to stop using such marketing terms to compare apples and oranges when we’re now faced with an entire supermarket of digital, ever-changing food.

Linden Labs propaganda must really work if we've got people putting Second Life in the same league as WoW. Pathetic. Like others have said, it's not even a game, it's poorly rendered 3D chat room for sexual deviants and pseudo-intellectual navel-gazers fascinated by the "metaverse."

I play both platforms. And there is a lot more out there. Occasionally I jump into EO.

But there is only so much time in the day and many other things fighting for my attention that I just stick to what I know. Which is WoW and SL.

I find the sour grapes about SL continually amusing. Whether anyone likes it or not, SL has had a big impact on the mmo worlds whether game or social. It just seems to me as if most disgruntled people entered SL, got lost after orientation realized the work that would be involved in creating place in the SL world and left in frustration. And most with the idea that this was done with the intention to haze them. That isn't true.

The orientation experience in SL is really borked. Until it is fixed, being a newbie in SL is equivalent of being taken out of your small town WoW guild of helpful friends and thrown into the big bad city all alone.

Amazing... WoW and SL *aren't* the be-all and end-all of MMOs? I had *no* idea. Give that wank... er, Wagner, a piece of cake!