Hmmm...
Please Note: These are my perceptions, they are not intended to offend, but simply respond to your post.
I was an avid WoW player until about a year ago when I switched to Lotro.
I loved the gameplay, the immediate - almost arcade - feel of the game. The rush of pet-tanking instances, the companionship of the guilds, the skill of playing a character well and seeing your name come near the top of the DPS charts even though I had worse gear than many of the players, the well designed instances, the stories that came from the RP there (I will never live a character as well as I did Jarek). I would like to play the game again at some point but...
I switched because of ;
- a lack of interesting, accessible content that did not require me to raid, (I already had three alts...)
- seeing many, many stupid names "DeathKillerz" and such, "FanOfPies" being the worst I saw. This was an RP realm...
- being told "I suck" by irritating players who were playing their characters so badly, why do they always ignore the evidence? If I'm dead how can I heal?
- watching RP events fail because of invasions by immature players,
- it had begun to feel that RP'ers were being pushed out to the margins and many roleplayers were giving up entirely and just joining the crowd,
- a horrible argument in the guild I was in,
- Deathknights - please don't ask unless you want a rant! I hate deathknights...
Now, I have to say that if you avoided goldshire, and were careful about who you grouped with a lot of these problems went away. I still have an inkling to play WoW again at some future point, but I am so rusty now I wouldn't know where to begin.
What I find wonderful about Lotro is that on Rp-Laurelin these problems do/did not exist! The content is still fresh to me, and you can solo or small group it. People still walk and roleplay openly. The graphics are amazing and the gameplay has a less arcade more relaxed feel to it. I love the graphics more in Lotro and haven't run enough instances to comment. The Warden and Runekeeper are such clever classes requiring real skill to play.
Recently I have started to see some of the bad points of WoW slowly creeping into Lotro - some awful names have started appearing, and there are a few people who seem to bounce everywhere. I fear that the maturity level is dipping here too.
I do not think that the original comment was intended to express that *all* wow players are immature, just that the *mean* maturity level seems very low.
I think one of the arguments is that WoW is now designed with addons in mind - they expect you to use them and design the encounters accordingly. Although I know players who still play wow, and very effectively, with no mods at all (Even though guild policy is that you MUST have a boss mod...), however if you are not superhuman you need these addons to play it well.
Click-casting and such *does* take some of the skill out of the game, in my opinion of course, I say that as one who used clique with all of my characters.
I think, for me, WoW was a techincal challenge - how can I use these addons to make myself more effective? - and that engaged me for three years.
Lotro is a different challenge all together - and I like it that way! Turbine have been very sensible with the restrictions they have placed on plugins.
WoW is a great game, but not for me any more sadly - and I mean that, genuinely, that I am sad about it.
Long sprawling rant over. God, I'm depressed now *sigh*