[Messianic]

Honestly, i'm not sure SoE made any mistakes that, at the time, the people involved in the field of MMOs would have done differently. Their goal was to make as many people as happy as possible.

People who say "greed" was the problem usually haven't looked into it deep enough to really see all the facets of the decline. The number 1 reason I found after discussing it with people who played through Luclin and beyond was The infinite creation of needless hurdles - the time commitment for some of the luclin and post-luclin content was so insane (counting AA grinding as one of the worst - the talent system was a massive improvement to the endless AA grind) that it turned people off.

Simultaneously, EQ became a massive, unending timesink yet possessing none of the original hurdles people complain were removed - i.e. transportation, corpse runs, etc. Which is it? Was it too easy and catered too much to the casual player, or was it too difficult and too much a timesink for high end players? Well, it can be both - but in retrospect our vision is a lot clearer than theirs was at the time they made these decisions.

The EQ model was mostly what made WoW so wildly successful. They were able to balance difficulty without needless hurdles - it takes a LONG TIME to travel on foot from odus to faydwer or odus to kunark (thinking in terms of the longest possible distance you have to travel without player/pok/translocator assistance) - it didn't take long to travel from, say, Darnassus to STV if you were high enough level - and after you did it once, it didn't take as long because you had the flight points. See the balance?

EQ attempted to find that same balance and failed. It's like balancing on a razor's edge, and it wasn't because of "money-grubbing" or some other unsatisfying, oversimplified answer (if they wanted only money, wouldn't they have made changes with more longevity?). They just missed the mark.