Warhammer Online was my textbook case study on how to take a great game and screw it up in the last 20%.
The first ten levels of WAR were fantastic, they grabbed interest, they were fun, dynamic, flowed well and had tons to do.
The next ten levels introduced new levels of complexity to the PVP and PVE elements of the game, and while the story elements started to drop off, you still had that sense of urgency and immediacy that made the RVR aspect of the game feel relevant.
The next ten levels were where things started to bog down a bit, classes became less balanced, bugs started to show up with more frequency, the PVE dungeons were frequently semi-functional at best.
And the last ten levels is where the entire game pretty much went to shit. Nothing worked right, class balance went largely out the window, the PVE dungeons were broken, the RVR systems didn't work, and the server infrastructure simply wasn't adequate to the task.
Mythic might have been able to pull it out if they'd done one thing right at the beginning, and one thing right at the end.
That first thing? Ensure faction balance not just in class abilities, but in player populations. There were supposed to be systems in place to offset severe outnumbering, but on my server, Destruction outnumbered Order so badly that when all the Destro players showed up for a siege, they'd crash the zone they entered. Admittedly, Order had fantastic coordination; we got all the best and brightest of the various guilds to coordinate into a single massive assault, each guild with specific objectives, all set to go off at a particular time.
We almost won that particular stage, until Destro just showed up and swarmed every single group down simultaneously.
The balance was often disputed, but it ranged in theory from 3-1 all the way to 5-1. Mythic wouldn't tell us, and the player-gathered metrics weren't exactly reliable. But people knew, and a lot of them just stopped playing as a result. Ironically, a lot of the Destro players quit when they realized that because the servers couldn't handle the sheer mass of their zerg, they'd never be able to actually get to the proper RVR endgame.
The thing they could have done right at the end was made damned sure that the endgame PVE dungeons worked. That would have given them time to work out the kinks in the RVR system, rebalance classes, and do all the little fiddly bits that should have been done in the beta but weren't. So long as people would have had something to do, they might have been able to salvage the game.
As it was, they went on to screw up by the numbers for a few more years. Last time I looked at WAR, the game had gone from dozens of servers to around four.
but alas the game was too pvp driven and was a bit of a wow clone. Shame I enjoyed it for a bit but it was alas a flawed gem.
