Things that other games did right~

[Lucifer]

Ragnarok Online did so many amazing things.
First, it had an extremely big emphasis on elemental weaknesses and strengths.
You could not use certain magic on some monsters because they were immune to the element.
Crafting a Lightning Damascus to kill Mermaids with my thief--awesome. Seeing that double attack proc and all those sexy numbers appear above their head...HGNNNNNNNNNNNNGHhh.

The EXTREME variety in builds was perfectly done too. You could go through many different paths with every single job. Perfect Crit Assassin was my prize; back when crits would neglect armor.

[Skies]

Well, i'm no MMO veteran having only played RO and City of Heroes. And enough people pointed out RO's good points and nobody but me seems to have played CoH so here goes:

* Character customization: Seriously, you could make your hero/villain look however you wanted it to. Hell a friend of mine built Cloud there with the new ´Giant weapons´ power pack. It was hilarious.

* Level synching: The Exemplaring/Sidekicking system was pretty awesome, let you party with your friends regardless of their level, did not make levelling meaningless as it still locks you out of powers if you're naturally low-level and when you're exemplared (your level is reduced to match the partners) and kept the rewards level-adjusted, so if you were sidekicked (raised level to match your friends) you'd still earn rewards normal for your level.

[Jennestia]

Ragnarok Online did so many amazing things.
First, it had an extremely big emphasis on elemental weaknesses and strengths.
You could not use certain magic on some monsters because they were immune to the element.
Crafting a Lightning Damascus to kill Mermaids with my thief--awesome. Seeing that double attack proc and all those sexy numbers appear above their head...HGNNNNNNNNNNNNGHhh.

The EXTREME variety in builds was perfectly done too. You could go through many different paths with every single job. Perfect Crit Assassin was my prize; back when crits would neglect armor.

Sadly though, you had the variety but there was always 1 -2 builds everyone went after in each class, i.e CritSin or an Asura build for their Champion.

[Fiosha_Maureiba]

Gau was an awesome blue mage....

Gau was fabulous. Crazy near-shirtless boy strutting around the Veldt, learning how to do all those monster moves and shoot missiles out of his armpits.

Everquest did cool items right for a long time.

Those items had to be cool for what you went through to get them. Bard Epic around the Ruins of Kunark time? That thing was game-breakingly awesome, but suicide-worthy depressing to get.

@Tibian, thank you for your post, it captures much of what I wanted to say. I forget it now that I'm on page 2 (40 posts at a time), but here goes.

User Interface
World of Warcraft: Popular add-ons would be incorporated into the mainstream UI, such as multiple action bars, seeing target's cast time, see the target of a target, etc.
Lord of the Rings and Rift: Good solid intuitive user interfaces.

Stat Transparency
World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings, Rift, SW:TOR, others. Before getting into a fight, we know what we should expect when getting into combat against the average same-level mob in terms of damage/mitigating damage, how frequently we'll be parrying/blocking/evading/resisting/critical, how much we're going to heal for, how effective our debuffs or buffs are going to be, how long they'll last, etc.

Story/Quest-Driven Leveling Option
SWTOR, Vindictus, Lord of the Rings, Rift, World of Warcraft, Champions Online, Aion, some others.
Some had this at launch, others had to hone it more. For players that are story-driven, you could start quests that built upon the lore of the world, your purpose in it, take you to places, and side-effect of all that fun was leveling. The flow of the story isn't frequently interrupted with several levels worth of grinding or massive halts for not having funds to update gear or abilities, which depending on game style and retention, could result in a large gap between stories and broken plots. If you wanted to grind on monsters, you could.

Character Aesthetic Customization
Character-wise: Aion. Phantasy Star Universe (advertised as MMO even if lobby driven).
Gear-wise: Everquest 2, Lord of the Rings, Rift, Runes of Magic, DCUO, Champions Online.

I could... go on I'm sure others will make the points.

[Lucifer]

Sadly though, you had the variety but there was always 1 -2 builds everyone went after in each class, i.e CritSin or an Asura build for their Champion.

Well there was a build for all sorts of roles.
Perfect dodge, perfect crit, double dagger sin, sword and dagger sin,
Warriors with their spear builds, sword builds, mvp, wop, or tanking builds..
So much variety and so many items...
The amount of cards was insane...but the grinding was ridiculous. Grinding for items was definitely a chore...really skewed my thoughts on MMORPG. Made me believe that some items were meant only for the elite few. I still think this way, but those times are definitely behind me now.

[Fensfield]

Off the top of my head?

Ragnarök Online made an awfully good job of being seriously creepy while maintain its cute, airy aesthetic. 'End result was a certain sense of meaning and danger, without the game compromising itself by falling into the 'badass/spikey/gory/dark = mature/valid/meaningful' fallacy. It also had a brilliant system for stat customisation, allowing for a terribly varied number of playstyles that remained fairly unique to each class. All dungeons being open was also nice, in my opinion, and the fact that dungeon difficulty scaled exponentially by level lead to most of the game's content remaining relevant no matter how old it was.

Oh, and RO's system was nice to people enjoyed levelling being a part of the entire game, not just a way to endgame and that was it. Grind aside - and I definitely believe that's controversial and perhaps too great - the game let you hit 'cap' and be very powerful for it. .. Or you could transcend and go for a great deal more power at a great deal more difficulty.

The online Phantasy Stars had wonderful character creations, immensely so. I've never seen systems as good - the ones claiming to have more detail or generally be better are normally limited in other, jarring ways - most often height or build. Not only did these games allow you to control your characters musculature, lack thereof, or indeed chubbiness if you fancied, but in Phantasy Star Universe as you modified their height, once it slipped below the realistic threshold for an adult it started giving them appropriately child-like proportions.

Another thing the online Phantasy Stars did right was believably divorcing character aesthetics from stats, largely through the thematic justification that one's non-innate stats came solely from their weapon and the shield system worn by their character. Phantasy Star Universe even played with this idea by making the 'Line Shield' a fashion accessory - the lines projecting that shield were woven through clothing as coloured, glowing patterns. 'Wonderful touch if you ask me.

[AngryNixon]

I just want to mention 1 thing that an earlier poster mentioned about World of Warcraft that is not directly part of the game itself but is extremely important and often overlooked:

Excellent customer support.

[TheVedis]

I just want to mention 1 thing that an earlier poster mentioned about World of Warcraft that is not directly part of the game itself but is extremely important and often overlooked:

Excellent customer support.

I can not agree with this unfortunately...

You obviously never had friends get banned for having too much gold on their account(all they ever did was farm for the sake of farming, they werent rmt or anything either), without an investigation, just pure and simple, you have gold, your banned.

[AngryNixon]

I can not agree with this unfortunately...

You obviously never had friends get banned for having too much gold on their account(all they ever did was farm for the sake of farming, they werent rmt or anything either), without an investigation, just pure and simple, you have gold, your banned.

No I never had that happen. I also don't know that I take that as a "customer support" issue necessarily or that I take it as the type of customer support I was referring to, ie. calling in for issues you're having with the game not related to account suspensions or banning which will always be a contentious issue regardless from the perspective of the suspended/banned party and his/her friends but I take your point in that regard re: a lack of appeal routes or reasons underpinned by more than "too much gold".

In spite of this I would still submit that excellent customer support is very important both respecting issues in and around the game itself and other things (such as billing issues) as they arise.

[Cichy]

I can not agree with this unfortunately...

You obviously never had friends get banned for having too much gold on their account(all they ever did was farm for the sake of farming, they werent rmt or anything either), without an investigation, just pure and simple, you have gold, your banned.

Ehmmmm, because XI did not do this? I had friends that sold the things they crafted on lvl 1 mules outside Jeuno and stored all the gil they made on them and once SE decided to ban bunch of them. It was that one fair day when they decided lvl 1 characters with gil must all be RMT. Yet again, selective memory of XI players.