The point of no return

I started up Hellgate: London yesterday after a very very long install (like trying to install Wow all over again starting with the original discs) and i quickly noticed something was missing... it was quiet, i was utterly along and the world felt completely dead. (wasn't playing the online bit for your info) It hit me then what large impact the MMO-bit of Wow actually had on me, it gives me somewhat a feeling of being among friends or at least fellow addicts... no other offline game would be able to fill the gap that Wow would leave behind. I might not ever be able to go back to playing single player games! At least not for long.

I believe one of the strong aspects of an online game like Wow is the community. My brother in law was guildless for a long time and he was online just rarely and mostly talking to either me or my GF, i blamed his limited playtime mostly on the lack of ingame community he has build up for himself. A couple of weeks ago i invited him into our guild as a Casual player so i'm curious if he will get drawn into the game more once he has build up some connection with the guild.. he has the same twisted humour (Rated M for Mature) as most of us have in there so that should work out well enough.
Most of us are part of several smaller communities inside Wow aswell, you're part of a classchannel, a channel created just for friends, an officerchannel, the guildchat or even part of the /trade spamming community linking legendary items. Pow!

The Hunterchannels i've been in have always been the more chatfilled rooms, i don't know if Hunters are more chatty when locked up together in a room but there has been more talking going on in this channel at times then in /raid. Even Hunteralts and ex-Hunters would join our channel for some "good" advice and random chatter. (plenty of randomness there)
But our guildchat is often good for a good ROFLBTN aswell and Officerchat has it's moments too, even when waking up early and logging in around 9-ish (in the weekend) and there are just 3-4 people i don't get a sense of being alone.
Our server has it's own forum aswell which was up long before Blizzard added realm forums and while i'm not really part of that community i do check it every couple of days and see the same people playing their own communitygame.
The Wow community doesn't stay just inside the game and even goes crossfaction there, if not mistaken there is even an IRC channel somewhere used for crossfaction chatter.

I've said it before but this community feeling is what people keeps together, what keeps Guilds from crumbeling even through the hardest storms. For some it's the only thing that matters, for others its a nice bonus but imo anyone without some connection to other players is quickly done with this game. Not only do you need that community to find groups or even raids to be able to see content you can't see solo, those people will help keeping that content somewhat fresh when doing it for the 100th time... adding some extra flavour.
It's clear to me... i'm a turned man, i'm a MMO player from now on.