Take off the fanboi blinders and smell reality man.

EverQuest sucks, a lot. When polled as to why people play the game, 80% responded that they play EQ because of the people they play with and the social interaction, something that's present in every game but works more for EQ because it's already popular and one is more likely to know someone who already plays EQ.

EverQuest's continuing popularity has nothing to do with it being a good game, it is popular only because it was the first 3d MMORPG and people picked it up first. It's only popular because of the snowball effect.

In reality, it's based off a crappy, bloated five year old engine that wasn't even good when it was released, gameplay is riddled with artificial time sinks, all the quests and storylines are as dry as a week old saltine, and the development is pure Monty-Haul "uberfication."

This doesn't mean Sony doesn't know what the hell they're doing, it just means that EverQuest was more or less the first of it's kind and they suffered the growing pains.

You claim everyone playing FFXI is just waiting for EQ2? Hell, most of the people I talked to while playing EQ1 said they'd never, ever buy EQ2. And guess what, EQ2 has one of the most highly anticipated games of all time to compete with: World of Warcraft. Considering that any given Blizzard game has sold exponentially more copies than EverQuest ever did, I'd say that's pretty serious competition.

But I digress; FFXI's popularity hasn't got a single thing to do with the impending release of WoW or EQ2. FFXI's success is based on the traditional formula: reputation and quality. It's my opinion that FFXI is hands down and without question a better looking, better designed, better written game than any other MMORPG out there. That is how it did in a year what it took EQ four years to do.