[Atmas]

I think Falkun is spot on with most of his post.

As far as its initial and continued success I would attribute that to a combination of design and being in the right place at the right time.

Timewise, they lucked out tremendously with arriving when the MMO scene was still fairly sparse but broad band had recently become more widespread. In all honesty I dont remember much advertising for EQ in general. A lot of people who had never played MUDs, MMOs, or Tabletop games were introduced to the concepts of gear and leveling through WoW. Lets be honest, most gamers love the sense of achievement, and WoW was good at giving it to them.

After playing many MMOs over the years now I have never seen a MMO so completely polished as WoW was when it launched. They also added a lot of features that most people now expect to be in a game, things like an auction house. Basically they raised the bar for what is expected as a starting point so high that most other dev teams run out of money before being able to get their product to a competing level.

I loved Vanilla WoW, didn't really like TBC, and once again greatly enjoyed WoTLK. Through all that though I always felt like the game was well made. I played it on and off again until Cata, over the years they have dumbed the game down a lot and melded the classes way too much.

Oh and I guess I have to mention PvP. I played Tallon Zek on live and for the most part enjoyed PvP but it was kind of obvious that in EQ PvP was an after thought. WoW made it a lot more dynamic and interesting.