Rather than focus on a bunch of explicit, boring tutorials, WoW teaches you the ropes and eases you into the game so slyly that you'll barely even notice you're in school. Instead of pitched battles against rabbits, cats, rats, and other tiny animals that you could kill in real life without much effort, the game immediately pits you against actual monsters. Garden-variety animals exist--you're just not expected to fight them. They merely hop around and occasionally get devoured by a passing predator. Since there aren't any artificial zone boundaries, you're free to wander wherever you want to right from the start, which removes the penned-in feeling common to low-level characters in most other MMORPGs.