Quote Originally Posted by vasdeferens View Post
With such a great resource like FFXI to draw ideas from I hate seeing so many more similarities to Warcraft
Because WoW brought many improvements in the way MMOs work, have introduced mechanics that are now considered standard, and made it possible for an MMO to have millions of active players, rather than the couple hundred thousand, maybe a million if they are lucky before that.

You can argue for the drawbacks of some of these improvements (like the Dungeon Finder system that was the last nail in the coffin for the WoW community) but the benefits far outweighed the drawbacks, when DF was introduced in WoTLK, the number of players doing dungeons increased dramatically, and player retention rates soared.