Is that a good thing? Aren't games like that designed to provide constant, positive, encouraging feedback for the player's "work"? There's no real risk of failure as long as you put enough time in, unlike the real world.
As a kid, it meant you would play hours and hours and get beaten repeatedly. You'd lose everything and then you'd have to find motivation to do better next time. You would find friends and nurture relationships because you needed and later because you found you really enjoyed them. Eventually, you would find you can kill for fun and profit, completely destroying weeks or months of a fellow player. It's a sort of Bottom-Up introduction on how civilizations form, because some time you realize the instabilities associated with violence (or, depending on your personality, just compassion from your repeated deaths). Protection networks formed -- killing someone might get you hunted. Guilds were the next step in this protection network, with huge political intricacies such as necessity of protecting some members which may or may not be in a morally justifiable position to maintain the position of power of the Guild.
I could go on. Some of the smartest people I know and many of my best friends played the game in their youth; I wouldn't say it made who they are, but if it didn't it surely provided an amazing opportunity to learn some thing you don't really do until a much later age, if ever.
It also happens to be a fun game. But it's super easy to make a simple, badly timed mis-click and lose your stuff to a random gank trap. (And no, ship insurance really doesn't help all that much.)
Edit: Feel free to disagree with me, but personally I wouldn't see WoW on a resume and think, "This person has experience doing hard work in the face of adversity".
Edit:
> Edit: Feel free to disagree with me, but personally I wouldn't see WoW on a resume and think, "This person has experience doing hard work in the face of adversity".
Many people would see a positive, depending on what you were applying for. Excelling at a game would almost always be a plus worth mentioning if you were applying to a gaming company, be it a developer or Twitch. It's no different than any extracurricular, only mention it if it's likely to help you.
Excel enough at a game, and you can start your own business based on the game (as much as businesses started by young gamers tend to flame out very quickly) or get unsoliticed job offers (as much as they tend to be shady). Or now, between Twitch and Youtube, make playing the game your job.
I'm also surprised Raph didn't bring up Eve at all. It's a pretty successful and significant sandbox that takes its lineage from Ultima Online. It's nowhere behemoth level that WoW is but it fills its niche.
I played on a PVP server, and the spontaneous PVP that occurred was almost never fair. I'd often explore the world alone, and get attacked by groups of enemy players. I fought back despite near-impossible odds; not giving up allowed me to improve. So when the game's arena system came out, and the playing field in PVP became more fair, my team attained the top rank (gladiator) in the most competitive battlegroup (bg9). Only the top 0.5% of teams earned that rank. I was one of only a few (less than 10 IIRC) hunters on US realms to get the gladiator rank for the first 2 seasons when they were underpowered and still had a dead zone. Most of the matches I played were against pros who also played WoW in e-sports tournaments.
I was a long-time member of a great guild, and although I wasn't the leader, I was chosen to be the player pursuing the Scarab Lord quest line for the guild. The quest took weeks to complete, and many parts required the help of my entire guild. I was one of two players out of 10,000+ to complete the quest on my server and open the AQ gates.
Initially at least, there were some parts of the game that took hard work and collaboration of an entire team in the face of adversity to reach some elite achievements. I don't disagree with you about the resume part though. Most wouldn't view WoW accomplishments on a resume as positive, and that's why I've never included them on mine.