Normal MMOG's have a few things in common. Although most players say that a game shouldn't be like real life, and that if they have boring elements they won't play, these gamers are unknowingly being duped into doing (in my opinion) the most boring things that real life has to offer.
Normal MMOG's require running long distances with nothing to do in between point A and point B. Some games have put in enemies to fight you, but this only slows down the mission, and it is often frustrating to die repeatedly or find out that the reward was not worth getting to point B at all. In some MMOGs you will have instant travel abilities, usually costing a lot of gold. You will then be able to go from city to city without the hassle of running miles and miles. In these games, most people just stand around the cities selling items or doing nothing.
This MMOG redefines travel. Your creature may be large or small, fast or slow, walking, running, flying, swimming, or anything. While you wander, you will see interesting plants and wildlife to observe, hunt, trade, play, tame, fight, or eat.
I don't really know why games have structured economies with safeguards against cheating, and even with value enforcement and taxes. It is all too similar to the boring and monotonous tasks of daily life. What I mean to say is that it is only a game, and virtual items have no real value. It should be completely allowable for players to use game-enabled tricks to steal from or fool other players into giving them the items they want. Real traders and salesmen are the only ones who can benefit from a structured game economy. They have been trained to fool people into selling them items for next to nothing, even with value enforcement and safeguards against cheating, they can even get people to give them items for free.
Just like in real life, you have to choose between a few things to do in order to support yourself. You have to toil endlessly and build skill over what seems like years in order to be able to buy good gear. Eventually you will reach a 'skill cap' which means you will never get better, and you are stuck in a dead-end job for the rest of your life.
Leveling up, as long as you can level up to an unlimited amount, sounds good to anyone. It means that with plenty of hard work and endurance, you will eventually become better than nearly everyone else. With level caps this benefit is lost. You may no longer become the best if you work hard, you will simply become one of the people who got to the last level. You will not be undefeatable, but instead, you will be able to fight other 'highest level' players as if you were both level 1 players. Leveling is therefore not even as good as real life, in which you can work very hard and master a trade, and you will be better than millions of other real people.
In most MMOGs, in order to get a quest, you have to click on an NPC and read a huge amount of text. Once you have your quest, you may have to run for hours to get to where your quest can be completed. Most quests are dangerous, but simple, and the rewards are small. Once you have completed your quest, you will probably have to return to the NPC to get your reward, and that means running for another few hours through mostly empty terrain. Often times, you will find an enemy on the path that kills you over and over, and your respawn point is probably even farther away from where you want to be than the NPC or the quest site was.
Most MMOGs have developer created races, items, clothes, buildings, wildlife, nature, and a ton of useless non-interactive doodads everywhere. All that expensive work is for nothing, for there are many more talented players who will make the exact same stuff completely free of charge. Most often, there are entire character sets, usually limited to three or four. Some MMOGs feature body parts, but that's not much better. Most of the more clever lazy MMOG developers allow color preference, which is a graphical trick that involves no extra work. Items are basically the same. Each item has its own limited amount of uses, they're not only similar, they're exact clones of each other. Often items can't even be dropped on a table to look at. Weapons are again clones of each other, with a tiny amount of variety of no more than seven basic types. In many games, armor is just a stat boost, and don't get me started on clothes. Many MMOGs have their own music, which is supposed to start and stop at appropriate times, but most players are running their own music, and have game music muted because it is annoying.
There's also another small detail that wasn't apparent to me at first. That is the idea that an MMOG is just like any other game, to be played, and then to be cast aside when done. These talented storytellers and graphical artists all get together to write the next generation novel or something, with an amazing "game experience" that takes you through eighty levels with fantastic scenery and NPC generated stories. You can then finish all of the quests and get to the last level, and sometimes there's even an 'end game' sequence. This is such a huge and disgusting mistake that I have vowed to never play such MMOGs when I find them. As any MMOG gamer knows, the community is one of the central aspects to any MMOG, and when a game dies, the players often begin to hate it because they lost many good friends, and they will often continue to exist on some unofficial forum. For those of you who have not experienced this yet, nostalgia grows deeper as time passes. You will often find players sitting in the center of towns, causing them to lag very badly, and just chatting with people they met there. If a developer ever analyzed this fact, they would realize that those players are also ignoring quests and essentially using the game as an IRC. This should enrage most MMOG developers because they are idiots, and they expect the players to 'grind' away and enjoy the developer's perceived "game experience" which is apparently amazing, yet which most players get bored of eventually and resort to chatting. Once the game "experience" ends, there isn't really any other good reason to play it anyways, which is why you will often find people with ten characters, always going through the system at lower levels and quitting the higher ones.