You can't blame WoW for stifling innovation, that makes no sense at all. The blame lies with lazy developers who copy what they see works, rather than use their imagination.

What Raingod said. If anything WoW holding the throne for so long should inspire innovation seeing as everybody who has tried to clone WoW with nothing but a few tweaks has failed miserably. I'm not a fan of ToR but I give them props for not staying within the "safe zone" that has lead to the downfall of so many potential competitors. Hopefully they inspire other games to use some out of the box thinking in the future, id love a different themed MMO to play during the months when WoW just feels stale, but jumping to RIFT would just feel like rolling alts on a slightly modded WoW server and as I said I'm not a fan of how Bioware did ToR, just isn't for me.

I don't think Sarah was implying that wow/blizzard was stifling innovation. I think she means that a lack of competition from other MMO's has been what has been stifling the genre. What this means is that blizz has not had the push it's needed to really improve upon wow, as many (legitimate non-trolling) people feel that cataclysm has been a step back compared to wrath.

There have been many contenders (pretenders?) to the wow MMO throne, however all of them have ended up being nothing more than cupcake opponents that Wow completely steamrolled.

One of the things that is impossible to predict about MMO's is the PvE endgame. That is where wow has shined the most, and why they are so successful. You can beta test things and do low level dungeons and pvp all you want. In the end, you need to have your players progressing in a meaningful fashion at level cap. This is where Rift was an absolute bomb - the endgame was a korean-level grind, completely filled with horrific buggy encounters and an almost complete lack of class balance. 1-49.9 in Rift is pretty darn fun, some grindy leveling but not too bad, but once you hit 50, you've got a few hundred hours of grind in before you can be any kinds of effective, let alone min/maxed.

This is why we need to hold our horses on SWTOR. No one has been even close to wow when it comes to the quality of end-game PvE content. A large percentage of the TOR playerbase will be level capped within 3 months, so months 3-6 will be most telling in terms of their long-term success. If you start seeing people talk about guilds getting famous for world first raid kills, with lots of youtube hits and twitch tv viewers, there is a good chance TOR will be able to compete. If it falls flat (ala Rift), you'll see a massive migration from TOR back to WoW.

sorry for wall of text, here's a tl;dr - It's other companies sucking that has stifled innovation in wow as well as the genre overall, and it's too early to call SWTOR a success. Wait till next summer and see what their numbers are and then we'll see some real effects on wow and the mmo industry, otherwise it'll be just another "okay this one's done, everyone back on the wow pile!"

No company has offered anything as innovative as LFR. It is completely revolutionary.

Because of LFR alone, Cataclysm will be hailed a great success when looked at in retrospect.

jfofla - LFR is just an expansion of LFD, which was invented in wrath. LFD was certainly worthy of praise as "revolutionary." LFR was more like the war of 1812 to LFD's revolutionary war... kind of a mop-up of what happened a few years before.

In the annals of mmo history, LFD in wrath will be hailed with much more notoriety than LFR in cataclysm. And while blizz does deserve credit for both LFD and LFR, it's the original dungeon finder that was most impressive.

I know that when it comes to my Other Game (CoH), I've ultimately come to be glad of the arrival of some challengers in the superhero MMO genre... which, while comparatively unsuccessful (IMO), has (also IMO) prompted the City devs to implement some much-asked-for features in order to stay competitive.

I can't really think of a whole lot WoW has done to innovate to be honest. I think it has topped the charts at renovation, spit and polish, and sparkles. However, the innovation thing seems a bit of false truth. I think they have taken elements of other games and made them work in their game better than their competitors.

Anyone saying that other games release a shoddy product at release clearly have forgotten wow at release. That was a debacle for about a month or longer in some instances.

I will say I don't think any other game will reach numbers wow has. There are just too many other good and slightly different theme-park games coming out in the future. Wow will probably continue toose more players as these games come out. Doesn't make it a bad game. Just one that will slow to varying demands. Different strokes for different folks.