Nothing will be World of Warcraft out the gate, nothing. What a game developer needs to do is create a game with a solid base to start with and then spend the next few years upgrading and fixing it just as Blizzard has done through numerous patches and 2 expansion.

What will a game need to draw people away from WoW? Well it can start by addressing some of the key issues that have been unresolved by WoW for a long time:

-Healing is (for most people) boring... find a way to make healing fun

-If PvE and PvP are both in the game, balance the skills in the game for these two aspects from the get go.

-All classes should be "Hybrid" in the sense that no class should be limited to one roll. Or some other fix so that there isn't a clash between "pures" and "hybrids."

-If there are talent trees like WoW, be careful not to make certain trees obsolete for the first 2-3 years of the game for anything other than leveling/pvp.

-There are many more, but these are just some of the issues that Blizzard will almost certainly never be able to fix because of how the game was started and has evolved.

Other than that, find a way to make the game fun, enjoyable, and not much of a grind (unless you just want to attract the hardcore crowd).

But yeah, beating or matching WoW cannot be done in one fell swoop. Its going to take a dedicated and talented development team lots of time to get to the level of quality of WoW.

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