That’s easy, I wouldn’t be playing at all. I would be doing something more constructive with my time.
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I’d probably be playing more single player games. I tried FFXIV and it has some fun things in it but I lost interest after a while.
probably still be playing EQ
FFXIV is interesting too with its development. The original got scrapped supposedly from low sales and just being awful to play before being brought back. But would Sony have bothered to overhaul it back then? (I mean they have taken a few hits with their live service games recently.)
Maybe FFXIV and some others like Guild Wars 2
Good ol Evercrack I mean quest 2
Hmm. The chances are good I would be on an SWG emulator.
The people answering “none” in this thread are the reason Blizzard has gotten away with their terrible game design choices for so long.
There are so many other good MMO’s out there some of these responses are insane. Like the people who buy any Pokemon/Star Wars product just because of the brand.
Guild Wars 2. No question.
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That’s because you have a lot of people who play WoW and only WoW. WoW was a cultural phenomenon and brought people into the gaming hemisphere who had never touched a game prior. It comes as no surprise to me that, should WoW not exist, they simply wouldn’t be playing games.
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Which is insane because WoW is basically an “Waiting to join an Instance” simulator now-a-days with the most toxic community in the genre.
Same.
The only reason it isn’t my default mmo is because raid and dungeon content is lacking comparably to WoW though I do slightly enjoy Fractals more than m+.
I just wish WoW’s open world content was on par with Gw2 at least.
EverQuest or Star Wars Galaxies if it still existed.
I’d be playing Worlds Adrift if it still existed (regardless of if WoW existed or not). It was a physics based sandbox MMO kinda game. You built sky ships and flew around from island to island finding blueprints and resources to improve and build your ship, as well as knowledge to unlock blueprints through the tech tree.
It was also PvP everywhere, so as a solo player it was pretty difficult (you can’t fly and shoot at the same time, you needed people to man the cannons and someone to man the helm, so realistically you needed at least two people to be successful).
Despite that I still put a few hundred hours in solo. I found that as a solo player, you wanted to stay as high up in the sky as possible, as most people would fly closer to island level, and then you’d want to just jump off your ship and dive bomb the island, either just missing the island and using your grappling hook so you wouldn’t die, or a glider so you could glide onto the island (with the grappling hook, you swing like spiderman, and it even had proper rope physics). And then you’d loot the island and build a tiny very cheap ship in order to fly back to your ship (or die, in which you’d lose your inventory, and then respawn on your ship, but you’d have to recharge your spawn pad eventually which required landing). Of course, another option in some of the higher tier islands was to hide your ship underneath the islands, since there’d be lots of caves and terrain that’d let you really hide your ship well. As a solo player you’d want your main ship to be basically just storage, and then you’d want to sail from island to island on a really cheap, easily replaced ship.
Overall it was a lot of fun. :v More fun with friends though, but even solo I still enjoyed it. Sometimes I’d sneak onboard other people’s ships and hitch a ride unnoticed. Somehow I managed to make my way to the max tier location as a solo player, and after losing all my engines travelling through the sand storm (since each tier had a storm wall you had to pass, which would pretty well destroy your ship if your ship wasn’t advanced enough).
I have a lot more I could talk about about it but this is already a very long post. 
I’ll share their trailer though so you get an idea what the game was kinda like.
I really miss Worlds Adrift. :v You have no idea how good it was if you never played it. I loved things like finding the remains of old player ships crashed into islands, and scavenging them for parts, etc. It was just such a good game. I’m still angry that they shut it down.
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If WoW was never made, there likely would not have been the huge push to develop MMORPGs in the late 2000s and early 2010s. I’d bet the established games in the genre would have sustained better and developed more. We’d likely be looking at bigger and better RuneScape, Ultima, EVE, and Everquest franchises still ruling, and the other major MMOs we see post WoW would be dramatically different. It is hard to say what we would be playing now, I think there would not really be a themepark MMO style in existence. I think EverQuest would have felt pressured to go more evergreen/sandbox to align with the feature depth of competitor products.
With the arrival of MOBAs the genre probably would have changed, or at least some of the existing mmos, to keep their player base.
Or not since the genre hasn’t seen that many of the original mmos shut down despite not being the massive money makers they once were.
Maple Story lol. If WoW didn’t exist, Asmongold wouldn’t exist, if Asmongold didn’t exist, I likely wouldn’t have ever touched FFXIV. Also if Shadowlands didn’t exist, I would have never even heard of PSO2, D2, or Black Desert Online.
So yeah, Maple Story.
Now if WoW stopped existing but did exist for the time it did, I’ll probably play Black Desert for the rest of my life.
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FfXIV is the most similar. For raiders its an easy pick. Raiding is just more fun there. Every class performs well and the raid size of 8 means each member of your team gets to shine. It has the most fun tank design of any MMO by a wide margin but I cannot stand most of the overly convoluted DPS designs… a 30+ button rotation that you must do in order is just not fun.
If you like M+ dungeons but wish they weren’t toxic there is Guild Wars 2 Fractals - what M+ was based on except imagine the “key” is part of your gear and never downgrades even if that noob on your left blows the run. Result is people are nicer and instead of screaming at the noob they train him to get better.
ESO is the best if you like open world, deep lore, and good stories that can be digested in your chosen order. I send FFXIV players to ESO when they get burned out on FFXIV’s too linear story…
New World… has actually become a good game now. Great dungeon design that suffers from not enough dungeons. They sort of copied WoW’s M+ but limited it to 2 dungeons they pick each week. So you’re stuck farming those 2 over and over.
But the gameplay is a LOT of fun. Give it one more year and I suspect it will be in a great place. Right now it’s good as a second play casually game.
I used to love Neverwinter but its cash shop has become too present since I left…
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Runescape/Old school Runescape
The one I’m playing now: SWTOR
It has greatly improved since release and it’s now a good mmo. Too bad people won’t give it a chance but on the other hand I don’t blame them because it wasn’t a good game at first.
In this hypothetical WoW free world, Everquest 2 wouldn’t have had any competition for being the Next Gen MMORPG, so it would have almost certainly flourished.
Everquest 3 would have come out, along with Landmark, which would have bridged Everquest 3, Minecraft, and Survival games into one along with their ‘voxel’ world building system.
I think I would be playing EQ3 in this case.
Probably a Tier’Dal necromancer.
…Unless there is a 40k MMORPG and it’s good and it’s not P2W… Imagine the reaction of ERP players who hang out in the Goldshire inn who read about Slaanesh and the Emperor’s Children…