What "Syncaine" doesn't realize is there is a new design rule you have to avoid when making an MMO - doubly so if your playerbase has touched WoW at all and your game is similar. And that is - if the player says to themselves "I could be having more fun playing WoW right now" - you are in trouble. Warhammer sadly ran into this I believe. They tried to be like WoW to entice players to switch, but when it felt like a bastardized version of the game they left many switched back. They probably would have done better if they gone their own way and formed a niche in the market, but I'm sure management there wanted a piece of that WoW pie.

Darkfall? Its hard to compare - first of all they won't let people buy it 100% of the time (seriously - I cannot on their website right now). Second - people who have managed to buy it are waiting in 1-4 hour queues to get in to a really really massive world that caps at 4500 people. Anyhow I think the end it will do well as a niche product once they get over their launch problems. The game will be especially popular for former UO players. Still it sounds like a crappy play style - most reviews I've read are people log in - wait for their friends in safe zones so they can venture outside. Usually hardcore pvp games rely on people to grief - and when they stop playing then what?

Was WoW lucky? They were going up against Everquest (see http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/12/27/1748252&mode=flat&tid=127 to get a feel for how SOE treated players), but on the flip side many of the people who designed WoW used to be EQ players - which is certainly radical - I can't think of too many that had any former design experience working on MMO's specifically actually and maybe that was the big difference there.