Hamburg  - Orcs, elves and online - for most people, those words taken together can only refer to "World of Warcraft." More than 11 million people are active players of WoW right now, which makes it quite easy to forget that the virtual world of Azeroth is not the only one in which players - for a monthly subscription fee - can live out online adventures with other gamers. Yet when it comes to pure playing enjoyment, some of the competitors are more than a match for the top dog.

There have been many attempts to knock Blizzard's WoW off its throne, but to date no one has succeeded in usurping the California-based company. Last year saw the release of Age of Conan, which cast the player into the barbarian world of Hyboria. Developer Funcom initially reported good results, with 800,000 subscribers by mid 2008. Those numbers later dropped to 400,000, and now are likely only a fraction of that.

Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning from the US's Mythic Entertainment and publisher EA was the second big online title for 2008. More than 1 million units are reported to have been sold. Yet later reports surfaced of consolidation of poorly populated servers -the machines that each contain a copy of the game world for a specific number of players.

This fits into a long history of frustrated contenders seeking to disrupt the dominance of WoW. The reasons are hardly a secret, and a glance at the official online forums for the games reveals plenty of dirt. Age of Conan was stricken in its infancy by technical problems. Even once those were corrected, its relatively opulent graphics meant that only users with current and powerful computers could get up and running.

WoW players are accustomed to advancing their fantasy character quickly to the highest level and then still having plenty of challenges to tackle. Funcom, for its part, failed to understand the importance of this for Age of Conan: while there was plenty of action and exciting quests for low-level characters, there was far less interesting content for those who had achieved higher levels. That mistake was only rectified months later.

Yet the gaming community learned from this: even titles that don't achieve immediate acclaim can still have a long life. Everyquest 2 is an example of a title that hit the market at roughly the same time as WoW. At the time the titles were considered equal competitors. After all, back in 1999 Everquest had been one of the key triggers for the entire online gaming craze.

Yet while WoW developer Blizzard learned from its mistakes and worked to simplify things for the players, Everquest publisher Sony Online Entertainment allowed its game to stay bulky. Add to that problems with the localization into different languages, and it's not hard to understand why Everquest 2 lagged far behind WoW in subscriber count. Yet the game that was once cursed in online forums and did improve over time - and today is actually considered the more complex of the two games.

Game makers can ultimately do everything right and still not climb the peaks. In 2007 a Westwood, California-based company called Turbine released an online version of the Lord of the Rings. The game received high marks from critics. Announced as a WoW competitor, the online version of Middle Earth now boasts more than 400,000 subscribers worldwide, reports Munich-based GameStar magazine.

Another reason why competitors to WoW haven't come close to matching its success: the enormous number of residents of Azeroth functions as an effective word of mouth campaign that draws in a steady stream of new gamers. People like to be in a familiar environment, after all, even if it's a virtual one. (dpa)