What caused the decline of EQ as the #1 MMO?

[Odeseus]

Only 1 or 2 people have brought this up, but this was my biggest gripe with EQ:

I was NEVER able to get to a point where I was comfortable in the progression of my character because I was simply not able to keep up with the expansion every 6 months schedule. It started with Luclin, got worse in PoP (where only 2 guilds on my server were even in PoTime by GoD, let alone clearing it consistently) and got insane in GoD where the vast majority of the expansion was locked to those not in the upper raid guilds. That drove me nuts and it was never really addressed.

I also never understood EQ2, at least while keeping EQ1 still active. All you were doing is splitting your development resources and your playerbase. It was as if Sony really wanted to kill EQ1 and figured EQ2 would do it. Like all of us would just naturally switch to EQ2. Unfortunately, we didn't all go to EQ2 but it opened the door to exploring other games. WoW came in at the perfect time and instead of many of us going to EQ2, we went to WoW. Personally, after the devs seemed bent on pushing me to EQ2, that gave me all the reason I needed to avoid it completely. I bounced from WoW and EQ1 for years till I found P99.

WoW too will fall, as all games eventually will. Look at some of the current MMOs coming out that hope to be WoW killers. And they have hope because many, many people are growing tired of WoW and are open to new games. The problem is that none of the games have been polished enough to hold people's attention, nor has Blizzard made any huge missteps the way Sony did. If Blizzard makes a mistake and releases a dud of an expansion, and if at the same time another MMO comes out that is just as good, you'll see WoW die as well. It is just that that time hasn't arrived yet.

[stormlord]

Actually, from what i've heard, WoW switched from being an MMORPG to a MMOG a few years ago as far as its goals are concerned. The developers that made WoW a hit don't drive things anymore. The game went in a different direction. Some say it's worse now than it was in 2005. I recall finding a link to this some years ago. Maybe if I googled it I could find it. Basically, one of hte high brass at WoW said that.