My good friend Adam, after four years of saying he would, finally bought World of Warcraft a couple weeks back. Now, he's not as bad as our Night Elf hunter friend here, but suffice it to say he's grown quite fond of the game as his first MMOG. There was a point the other night where he simply typed into guild chat, "This game is amazing" as he flew over Azeroth on a gryphon.

Recently WoW was heralded to be the most played PC game by the Nielsen ratings, not that this should shock anyone. Blizzard also recently announced that 11.5 million people across the globe are playing WoW with an active subscription. Not 11.5 million accounts... 11.5 million ACTIVE accounts. Four million in just a couple of months have bought their latest expansion pack.

It's easy to sit back and point your fingers at WoW, to hate aspects of its popularity, and to say you don't like the end-game. I've done all three myself over the past four years. But also over that time, I've been playing WoW more often than any other MMOG. Maybe I'm a hypocrite, but maybe Blizzard's just doing something really, really well.