My 2nd fav MMO of all time I did not get into until a year after its release. LOTRO really took time to mature, but I also think it had a solid base built into it. I have played alot of MMO's in the 10 years I've been an MMO player, I feel that I have a pretty good handle on what I think works for me. I think Warhammer has extreme potential in being a good game, will it ever draw the crowds they hoped? I don't think so. The game itself is not so flawed.

Age of Conan on the other hand is nothing like they advertised it for so long. Do they have a working game now? Apparently. Though if you compared what it is now to what their websites were hyping a year before it was finally released, you will realize its a flawed base with band aids.

While I think there are many people who give a game the first month and leave it for silly reasons, or because its not as polished and content heavy as a 5+ year old game, I think there are several veterans out there now that can just judge a game by their experiences. The market IS getting mature, there is no longer any room for the "get whatever out there" guys like Funcom. Its antiquated business tactics that used to work in this industry.

With the increase of veteran players choosing their games wisely for the right reasons, also comes the rise in percentage of people choosing to leave games for the right reasons. For every person playing WoW just because they've invested so much time in it, there's people playing WoW because they actually love the mechanics. For every person that left Warhammer just because it wasn't polished as much as WoW, there were people leaving Warhammer because they did not like the look of a PVP grind. For every person that left Aion because it was too cartoony, there were people that left because they disliked the narrative.

Its reaching a point to where I really do think there can finally be games that pull people away from WoW due to the fanbase of MMO's finally re-maturing. The sad part is that there are not alot of developers that believe this. There's still alot of Atari ET's coming down the road. MMO's take so much resources, and it seems like they believe they can just throw whatever they want into a game, add in a long experience progression and boom they'll have a success. Sadly instead of improving their game concepts, people like Bill Roper seem more interested in maximizing the amount of money they can squeeze out of their subscribers in a short amount of time, instead of trying to make new games that are good enough to keep people loyal.