I used to be really involved in Runescape for a few years. It was excellent back then- great quests and story, good items, a lot of player community. Since then though, around 2008 it just started going downhill, in my opinion at least. It became too kid-oriented, they started changing graphics and gameplay, and they started to ditch a lot of the freedoms and open aspects of the game to make things more safe and easy. It just got to be too much and a lot of my friends bailed as well.
I haven't played WoW though.