I played it a couple years up to my army service, before and a little bit after The Burning Crusade. I found I enjoyed the way/journey/experience to max level more than the end game, seeing all the wonders of the world, exploring beyond my level, tackling the dungeons with randoms or a small group of friends (some still keep in touch with on places like Discord, before that IRC). I only did one raid, Kharazhan or whatever it's spelled, it was fun to be that dedicated as a tank for a while but then when you had to repeat things in harder difficulties with the heroic dungeons and shit plus the expansion making all my hard earned gear obsolete with greens better than my epics just laying around and knowing every expansion will do the same soured me on the whole thing but when a game has to never end you can't avoid that stuff I guess.
I also liked the PVEVP battlegrounds but not the pure PVP arena stuff, I didn't dabble in that at all. Probably because I stuck with being a tank which was a bit useful in PVEVP bits, I only ever had one warrior and later tried a Paladin too, supposedly to try something new, but I ended up speccing him for tanking too, lol, I just enjoyed that gameplay I guess, even if it made solo efforts slooooooooooooooooow due to a lack of dps (but even the random wandering and doing quests in the overworld before tackling the area dungeon was better with friends anyway, at least a duo if not trio). I think another thing I disliked was they sorta phased out PVPVE in favor of the more popular pure PVP arenas by not updating it to accommodate the higher levels so that the enemies were pushovers for level 70 characters or something like that but I could be remembering wrong.
I briefly tried it again at one point but without the group I had back then it wasn't as fun so I suppose it matters who you encounter/meet when first going in. I've tried one or two other MMOs since but none of them clicked the same at all and I generally don't try any more. I was also never big on multiplayer outside some brief Counter-Strike period or of course back in the day having friend tournaments in Tekken 3 and the like but still WoW sucked me in good. I think the only other multiplayer game I stuck with for a time was Monster Hunter 3, which I got to play with ex-WoW mates. They've also added so many QOL things over time that changed the experience and it makes sense to have them now with a bloated game and different audience but it also changes the experience compared to things folks enjoyed when they got into it years back, like how you had to walk the world to reach the dungeon rather than teleport there with the auto join/find group stuff, it's completely different to having to set up the journey with a bunch of friends or attempt to find randoms who commit. But again it just makes sense they phased that out for ease of access eventually.
Never played it, and I'm glad I never did. I've got these two married friends who got addicted to that game when it hit the bigtime and they did nothing else but play Warcraft in their free time for god knows how many years. It was all they could talk about. If they visited for a birthday, they always had to leave early because there was a raid scheduled later that evening. She's still playing Warcraft.
No way, some folks found something they enjoyed so much they kept doing it, even to the point they left your birthday parties early to hang out and play with online friends instead, how sad for them. I mean if you had said it ruined their marriages cos they didn't even bathe to play and peed in bottles that's another thing altogether but just from that line it sounds perfectly fine to me, if a bit outside the norm, but it's probably safe to assume they're good friends with some of the people they play with all these years so they're also being social in their own way and don't always do hardcore shit like run raid numbers and tactics but also have some casual fun with it. MMOs provide a range of experiences for any mood and mode if they're good so it's not like playing any other game forever, it's not like replaying metal gear solid endlessly, or even other online games like COD.
