How to actually kill WoW

[brickbuster]

so obviously we are all looking forward to Planetside 2. But I'm here to talk about mmorpg's and specifically, two games, World of Warcraft and Star Wars: The Old Republic. For years now, game companies have tried to topple Blizzard's World of Warcraft, because of the amount of money that mmo's make. The most recent attempt was EA-BioWare's Star Wars: The Old Republic. In case you havn't been paying attention lately, SWTOR was a gigantic flop. Linear questlines, nonexistent PvP, mechanincs dumbed down so badly a toddler could play it, and a complete lack of endgame content sent it's subscriber rates through the floor. Now, the game was never exactly meant to succeed (it was made by the exact same people who did Warhammer Online, another WoW clone; they just got shifted to BioWare), but I still think that in evaluating how to kill World of Warcraft, it's essential to look at the industry's most recent, and largest, failure.

SWTOR's selling points include:

Two factions
8 classes to chose from
Linear Questlines
Voice Acting
Warzones(Battlegrounds)
Flashpoints(Dungeons)
Space Combat(Space on Rails)

In case you havn't noticed, 5 of these are extremely similar to WoW, and the other two just suck. The Voice Acting, while new to an mmo, prevents BioWare from coming out with new quests and general content as often as World of Warcraft. Space on Rails is worse than Top Gun for the NES, because at least in that game you could move your plane around a little bit.

Basically, EA fucked up because they were too stupid to see that in order to draw suscribers away from WoW, they had to provide something that felt different from WoW. I don't mean Star Wars instead of Dungeons and Dragons, I mean in actual game mechanics. They don't want World of Warcraft to be ported into a Star Wars game, they wanted stuff like epic space battles between players, light saber battles that weren't just animations controlled by hotkeys (just like WoW), an actual moral system(like if you act like a Sith, you become a Sith, not get Dark Side gear during raids). Troopers are supposed to play like Troopers, not Hunters. Jedi are supposed be Jedi, not Pally/Mage hybrids. And Han Solo does not heal people, damnit!!!

TL;DR: If you're trying to make an mmo to kill WoW, don't make a crappier version of WoW. I'm sick of seeing this kind of boring, repetitive bullshit from the game industry.