You missed the vital link
I was a WoW player since the first open beta, can't believe how long ago that was! WoW's been so good for the mmo sector, its brought hundreds of thousands of new players into the genre. I've been playing mmo's since Legend of Mir, that was about 6 years ago i think, and its so hard now to touch any other game because you just don't get the same level of interaction and gameplay.
Theres 5 highly anticipated mmo's coming out over the next year. LOTR, Warhammer and Conan are 3 of them, and each look pretty promising. There was a good article over at bit tech about them.