Absolutely. WoW, in fact, put me off most traditional RPGs after playing a substantial amount of it. Having gone from a game where the fights was actually challenging, my build mattered to the point that I needed to read up on it and understand the mechanics behind it, and, most importantly,
encounters actually had some design and strategy to them to games where I could literally follow a flowchart to success in pretty much every encounter and my builds never matter felt like a huge downgrade. There is a ton of filler in the way, of course, to that hardcore raiding endgame experience and most guilds unfortunately look up the strats beforehand (this is the equivalent of reading a guide to every Zelda dungeon and boss before playing in my mind) so it's easy to miss the true quality of the game amidst the crap that people associate with the genre, but that potential is there and I don't feel like most single player RPGs can ever match the best content I've played in WoW, social aspect aside or not.
Edit: This thread is a perfect example. Every time the topic comes up, people talk about progression, the rewards, the social element, the sense of exploration, blah blah blah.
No one ever talks about the real, true game underneath it all that gives all those elements a purpose because, to be fair, very few ever get to even see it. WoW makes you run through a super shallow RPG experience in the leveling to endgame run. Then you get a taste of that real encounter design in instances. Then, if you've stuck with it long enough, you might join a guild and see the real fights- the content that makes the game worth playing in the first place. (I'll note that all of this is based on my WoW experience, which ended after WotLK. I have no idea how the game is now.)
Boss Fight in WoW, for example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZEJA52NrgI Contrast this with the encounter design of, say, an FF or DQ. Even EO, which I like, and the older PC classics don't approach this level of almost puzzle like unique tactics.
I'm still waiting for the game that offers a single player WoW experience minus all the filler progression BS. Do it with a Baldur's Gate style perspective and control scheme, (real time management of a large party with a pause feature) simplify any one character's rotations to account for the fact that your player is now playing and coordinating all team members instead of just playing one, and structure it like Shadow of the Colossus, with unique boss encounter after unique boss encounter, no filler in between. Make respeccing both available and expected so as to be able to require different builds for each fight and encourage players to experiment. Hell, if Dota 2 ever gets substantial modding support, I might just try to make it myself as its perspective and heroes would be a decent foundation for this idea. (The Halloween Roshan boss even resembled the sorts of encounters I had envisioned, albeit at a extremely simplistic level.)
