Waiting for the WoW killer

After quite a bit of game hopping this past year, I have decided to just play World of Warcraft with the occasional sprinkling of single player games like Dragon Age: Origins and Zuma.  Yes, I know, how boring, how utterly MAINSTREAM.  I should be playing some obscure Asian MMO that is so much better than WoW and is free to play, right?  Who cares if it only has 2000 subscribers and the game client crashes every time you open your inventory?  It's still better than WoW, right?

Something I've learned from playing many different MMOs is that WoW evokes some very visceral responses from people in general chat.  Play any other game, be it EQ2, Conan, Aion, Vanguard, Lotro, or Hello Kitty Online, and if you dare to so much as mention WoW in chat, you will be instantly assaulted with enough anti-WoW venom to kill a whole cave-full of ogres and poison all their little piles of poo too.  Everyone likes to hate on WoW, but the truth is almost every MMO gamer has played it, and almost everyone I've know who has stopped playing it has come back after cheating on it with some other floozy MMO.

Every time I play another MMO, I find myself comparing it (usually unfavorably) to WoW.   It is hard for a brand new game to be able to compete with a game that has had so much money poured into it to make it as polished and widely appealing as possible.   Whether it be a clumsy user interface, a cumbersome loot distribution system, broken crafting/harvesting, a barely functional auction house, unattractive or jerky combat animations, inconvenient fast travel options, or buggy gameplay, there is almost always something about a new MMO that makes me wish I was playing WoW.  The new game might have a couple aspects that are better than WoW (usually player community, graphics, and game lore) but it usually isn't enough to balance out all the negatives.

I'm still waiting for the WoW killer.