World of Warcraft

World of Warcraft moved the universe of Blizzard's strategy games into a persistent world with a monthly subscription. The barrier to entry here is lowered on purpose. By 2004, online RPGs punished death with the loss of experience and items and required a group for almost any action. Here death sends the character back to its body and damages the equipment, and most of the levels are played through alone.

The world is laid out in copies. Each server holds its own version of the continents with its own population, and dungeons are moved into isolated instances that only the assembled group enters: the queue for the enemy you need disappears. Quests are handed out as a list and lead the player across the map from camp to camp; most RPGs later adopted this kind of quest log. The cooperative part is pushed up to the top, into raids of several dozen people, where scheduling the gatherings already requires outside organization: guilds, role assignment and voice chat.