I Watched Some World of Warcraft Streams

 Don't look at me like that. There's a good reason.

 I noticed that WoW mobs are incredibly boring. I also noticed the hosts are incredibly boring.

 Then it hit me: that's why WoW was so successful. It was boring. Boring people like boring "entertainment." They get envious and upset by interesting mechanics.

 I saw a couple girls hosting a WoW stream. First they talked for five minutes about how some stranger's dick was small. "I bet he smells." Yes, riveting, thank you. Then headsets. "I didn't like this one, so I bought this other one, which I did like." Except five minutes long.

 Tried another.

 Talked about drinking water. "Coffee doesn't do it for me, I think everyone should drink 500 gallons of pure water a day." Except five minutes long. Chat: "Is it possible to drink too much water?" Asking the tough questions. I know search engines are far too difficult for an average man to use, let me google that for you.
 And...then...talked about headsets.
 Finally we have amogus. "I should behave differently when I kill stuff in among us." Any nice anecdotes about funny things that happen in among us? "What? No. Some of those aren't about me? Why would I talk about them?"
 "That scared me. Imagine I like fell? Down? And died from fall damage." I probably have to mention this isn't a six-year-old. 

 

 Honestly it's a little impressive. Don't you have to put some effort in to be that aggressively boring? Surely it doesn't come naturally? Surely they find it boring too, they merely have nothing better to offer?

 Note that the enemies in WoW are all damage springs with exactly the same HP at any given level. There's a bit of a difference between a caster and a melee type, but only in that the caster does more damage - either because melee classes have heavy armour which they pierce, or because they have the range to hit the caster classes. They're not even as sophisticated as Dragon Warrior 1 enemies.

 DQ1 has stopspell and sleep. That's three kinds of fights just on the player side. Four if you count hurtmore. Then four more - for a total of sixteen - because the enemies can cast too. Plus the metal slimes. The model of the enemy tells you, if you've learned, how much damage and HP they have. In later entries, nearly every enemy has some unique form of causing you problems.

 And yet WoW is vastly more grindy than even DQ1. With exactly one kind of fight, every fight, from 0-60. I especially enjoy the recommended levelling rotation for classic frost mages. "Frostbolt." You don't wand or autoattack. Spam one button for days of cumulative playtime. (I kid, you open with frost nova, /then/ spam frostbolt.)

 Then you move through to later expansions and realize most players can't handle a rotation more complicated than one button. Despite spending up to weeks of playtime learning their class. Some of them can't reliably manage to not stand in fire while spamming one button.
That's the massive market WoW tapped into.

 Is there a selection effect? You can stand in fire and spam one button while not even looking at the screen. Perhaps "who plays this shit?" is exactly the answer - almost anyone who wanted to, you know, play a game stopped playing around level 10 because it's such a shit game if you try to, you know, play it.

 Preselection: playing a game solely because others are playing the game.
All the WoW killers also had shit gameplay. Of course if your primary selling point is preselection the biggest option is the only one that can be successful.  

 Classic WoW is a wonderful combination of tedious as fuck and still hard. If you pull more than two enemies, you will die. Maybe if you do everything perfectly you won't die, and avoiding the double-pull is hardly trivial. It's entirely possible to want to get inside a spawn zone to hunt down quest targets, but you can't clear a path faster than they respawn, so you have to risk getting surrounded.

 P.S. It's indisputable that the class designers of WoW never played their own game, and just barely managed to figure anything out by 3.0.

 Ironically the instances are better. Bosses indeed have mechanics. Warriors don't have to tediously heal all the time, because there's a healer. The variations in enemy pack create variation in fights. But the instances aren't MMO. They're 5 player games. "WoW is an acceptable game if you remove its major selling point."