The game is designed without safeguards against population imbalance. WAR lost a lot of subs just over the fact that people felt overwhelmed on the outnumbered side, or bored on the overpopulated side. As you might expect this has a see-saw effect where a lot of one side quits, then a lot of the other side quits, until you are left with about 5 med pop servers.

The developers insistence on pushing out new content and classes instead of fixing, balancing, or bugfixing old content and classes. Cranking out 4 new classes while ignoring balance and bug issues with the launch classes, and cranking out new zones while ignoring the fundamentally badly designed T4 RvE game simply amounts to a bread and circus trying to lure back customers into mistakenly giving up another $15.

The PvE in this game is completely awful. Most 6 man instances are incredibly boring, buggy, and brain numbing. It can't hold a candle to better PvE MMOs (WoW, LOTRO, DDO) and frankly it shouldn't have even tried.

RvE is still a huge problem. The endgame consists of PvE encounters. LOTD is the complete opposite of RvR - one side goes into the instance and PvEs, while the other side grinds PQs outside.

The combat system is too simplified and rewards zerging.

Itemization remains a mess and PvE is still required to get the best gear, not to mention being faster to obtain than PvPing.

Anyway.. they blew it and their game sunk.