before WoW was released there was open and closed beta's. early after the first closed beta release there were private servers (and an entire client to manage them) where the game was totally skin and bone. It was up to the mods to administrate the population of pirates that wanted to check the game out, as you can imagine it was far from spectacular. There was a quest or 2 to show you around and where you can grind, the occasional appearance of a level 1337 moderator - and attempts at random lame events like fighting a high level creep one fireball at a time or a drinking competition (-_-) to name a couple.
the point is - you can do a whollllleee lot of stuff with the WoW engine. Its the same number trading game that includes experience gain like in warcraft 3 or any RTS game there is really.
when you think about all the custom games there are out there for starcraft and warcraft alone, you'll begin to see what kind of things communities can create (under the restrictions of the engine) with WoW!!!!
my favorite example is a wc3 game called footman frenzy (http://www.nohunters.com/ ) where 4 teams of 3 use varying unit spawns and heros to fight for control over a no mans land that generates mana for their abilities which will eventually destroy opponents bases. the game cant be directly emulated (due to lack of unit control as far as i know), but the whole concept can be ripped off and played with on a potentially larger scale of combat (many more units or heros)
its just an idea, but i think somebody out there could do incredible things with that engine and a group of people who could just dl a server package or find his game on a server browser
