"What's your favourite MMO?" is a good question, but "When was it your favourite MMO?" might be a better one.
I don't have to think too long about the answer if I'm asked what my favourite singleplayer games are.* The only way that list changes is if I play something that's new to me and good enough to take a spot, or if I go back to a game and find I don't enjoy it like I used to. That doesn't happen often, and if it does it's likely due to some change in my attitude to gaming. I do find I don't have quite as much patience for 90s difficulty as I once did...
*Doom, Minecraft, Stalker SoC, Civilisation II and Fear Effect.
What won't alter my opinion is a change in the game itself, because singleplayer games don't undergo significant changes post-release. Sure, nowadays there's DLC, but aside from remasterings and the like the nuts and bolts that make up a singleplayer game will be the same today as they were when the game was new. This cannot be said of MMOs.
The ongoing development of MMOs is one of the great strengths of the genre, enabling games that have been running for a decade or more to remain relevant and continue to offer something new, even if they'll never be cutting edge again (if they ever were), and so it gives them a longevity that singleplayer games can only dream of. With the recent launch of the PS5 it's worth reflecting that World of Warcraft launched during the era of the PS2.
This strength can, however, also be a weakness. Some updates, particularly those that impact core mechanics, can change a game until it's very far from the game that it was. Hence the question - when was it your favourite MMO?
This does come up a lot during discussions of certain games in the genre, particularly WoW, where it usually comes down to a question of which was the player's favourite expansion. I don't see it as often relating to other MMOs, unless there's some clearly defined before-and-after dividing line. I've never played either Ultima Online or Star Wars Galaxies but I still know what's meant by pre-Trammel or pre-NGE.
Of course to have an informed opinion on this it helps to have played the game for a fairly long time, and certainly both before and after whatever changes made the game worse (or better - it can happen.) This is why I don't have especially strong opinions on the relative merits of The Secret World and Secret World Legends - because I never played TSW for that long before the relaunch.
Neverwinter is different. When I first played this game the latest module was Tomb Of Annihiliation, with Lost City of Omu coming out while I was on my way to level 70. I progressed through those campaigns, and the ones that preceded them, all the way through to the launch of the next module, Ravenloft. That's a strong run of content updates, and all of it integrated well with all that had gone before. Nothing was wasted. Everything worked.
Then came Heart of Fire, with the changes to the crafting system, and then Undermountain, which raised the level cap to 80, and in doing so trivialised most of the older content in the game.
It's that version of the game - pre-HoF and more especially pre-Undermountain - that I look back on as being Neverwinter at its best, and it's comparisons to that version of the game that fuel most of my criticisms of the current game. It's not other MMOs that this game at times fails to live up to, it's the better version of itself that it once was.
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