I know your intentions are honourable, but no thanks
oh, and I'll never have a game console too :)

There's always emula-ACK!!! *Gets attacked by a mob of righteous piteous fanboys at the thought of not buying dedicated hardware and rare copies of a game 10+ years old*

Help... me...

*dies...*

I don't see how someone can play the same game for 5 years straight... It can't be that fun or compelling. 99% of what i hear is they play because their friends play, and if they didn't have friends playing then they wouldn't play.

Sorta a chicken & egg problem

... I don't get it.

I just don't see anyone playing the same game for 5 years, regardless if they have friends, regardless if they play in and out randomly with other people, regardless if they replay the campaign and explore every nook and cranny. Not being cynical, i just don't follow.

But it's not the same game.
Take WoW for example. I started playing in 2006, with patch 1.12. There was quite a bit of stuff to do then, but my main focus was getting to max level, to be able to do the end game content. Once I did reach it, Burning Crusade had already been announced. So no use for me trying to get equipped for end game, but prepare for the next part of leveling.
Enter BC. ~10 areas to explore and do quests in, each with quite a few dungeons (usually 4). So I start leveling again, looking for recipes for my character, and trying to clear each area. In the same time, look for other people to do the dungeons with, so I can clear my quests and/or get items from them. Later on, do the same dungeons again, to help other people get their quests and/or items.
Reach max level, start the 5K gold grind for the epic mount. At the same time, look for a guild to go raiding with. Few, if any, guilds manage to steamroll through the end game content, so it does mean you will be attempting the same raids over and over until you manage to clear them easily. And once you do clear them easily, new raids will have appeared, so the grind begins anew.
That takes us to 2008. 2 years to explore (almost fully) the Outlands. Then Northrend came. Again, new areas, new dungeons, new quests, new raids. And once you are certain you've done everything there is to do, new patches deliver new stuff.

Add to this the seasonal events, which do give you something extra to do every month or so. So no, for WoW, you don't play the same game for 5 years. You play an evolving game. Similar to how one could be playing a pen and paper RPG for 5 years, yet it's not the same game.

JMich said it. If the game is any good it does evolve and the quests are varied. Also, if you like to talk too much many games allow you to chat a lot of the time even if not during certain parts of quests or raids.

I've only ever really played 1 MMO long enough to build up multiple characters. In that one I have a character for each path + a few extra to explore the remaining storylines.

What JMIch described was a gear treadmill, not the game actually changing or doing anything interesting. After a few repeats level + raid + grind gets really old and boring.

Also, I really don't appreciate a game yanking the rug out from under me with mechanics changes. The year of trying to play the laughable pariah class in GW2 just cemented that.

WOW had the worst community among the MMOs i played. Constantly people told me i am retarded (didnt know that word back then in 2009). Two examples i remember are...

On a RPG server i started as an orc. In one of my books Robar is an Orc who learned elf language thanks to his owner (when he was a slave). So I roleplayed as if I knew Elf language. In less than 10 minutes atleast 100 people told me I am an idiot for not knowing the lore of the game.

While in a party i clicked "need" for an item that I could use for my other character. I was called retarded by all the other party players and then kicked out of the party thus automatically kicked me out of the dungeon in a few seconds.

I played WOW for only 1 or 2 months just because the box i bought gave me 2 months free subscription. But in that time I was called bad words more than my entire life and I am 36 today.

For you, perhaps, but remember that ultimately the broad "we" look for different things in different games. Using WoW as an example, I really liked the environments and the storytelling, and paticularly exploring, and while I didn't actively RP, I got really invested in many of my characters as distinct "toons."

There are certain zones that, even going back to them now (messing around on a free demo account) is really satisfying - a bit like going back to my hometown, actually. Even if I have little desire to ever have a paid account again, and I think they've overly watered down certain aspects of the game. I enjoyed leveling more back when it required more effort, personally.

While I agree there are people who either really do, or at least say they are only still playing because that's where their friends are, WoW in particular actually does have a very broad range of things one can do (while leveling and in the end-game), and it's also very carefully engineered to take advantage of human psychology, particularly in the blend of predictable and random rewards (the "Skinner box").

WOW clearly does have a lot going for it. But none of the aspects of WOW you've talked about are related to what I was talking about or JMich described, i.e. gear treadmills.

My point was that gear treadmills get boring or frustrating pretty quickly for many people. They don't stay interesting forever. The fact that you've stopped playing except on a free account is a small supporting anecdote, but I'm not sure how else your post is really a reply to mine.

Usually one. In rarer cases two: I make first character, play for a while, get to know the game, try many stupid things, make mistakes, get big losses. Then I dump this character, make another and play better.

The response was that not everyone played/plays the game as a "gear treadmill." So both for me and many of my friends, that really had little to do with either the appeal or dissatisfaction with the game. I pvped in blues (one reason I did BGs over arena), and raided in whatever was available.

I raided some (seriously for about 2 years, but not at all for 2 years, and middlin' for the rest of the time), but spent more time exploring and leveling alts. Some people fish/craft. Some people ERP in Goldshire.

So personally I think the "gear grind" is unsatisfactory as a singular answer - you could choose to focus on that, but there were plenty of other things to do if one chose.