Quote Originally Posted by namasy View Post
JP mmo's dev's have a long way from other world class mmo that are out at moment, is good idea to learn from the best.
Because obviously FFXI wasn't successful.

Quote Originally Posted by Lirion View Post
What sells a MMO is not the same as what makes the players stay. As far as I know TOR sold pretty well but lost subs pretty fast. I guess what sold that game was the Star Wars franchise and what they were trying to do with the story, everything was voiced and you could choose good or bad paths through your story. Party members also had a chance to influence the outcome which was pretty cool. But other than that the game felt like a singleplayer game most of the times.

People like to say that TOR bombed because it was a WoW clone and I don't think it was a WoW clone at all, reasons read the above again. IMO it bombed because there was nothing to do once you finished the story except some Heroics and that the game felt like a SP game in a MMO world.
I think you're right about this. From what I understand (I never played it) TOR had great storyline stuff, but once you ran out of story modes to play, that's pretty much it. The endgame was either non-existent or uninteresting.

I also haven't played GW2, but I hear mixed things about this game as well. A friend of mine plays it and really likes it, but at the same time he complains that it took hardly no time at all to level up. It also seems like once you've gone through the main story and capped out, the only thing to do is do PvP. This isn't a big surprise considering it is a rather PvP focused game.

Just my opinion, but I think ARR is going to cater to more casual players but at the same time have challenging content for the midcores and hardcores. They don't need to have subscription numbers like WoW to be successful. They just need to develop a game that people will want to play for a long time. This will make the game profitable and worthwhile to continue running.