[dogma1138]

WoW arguably had as much influence on EQ as EQ had on it (and it's not like EQ was the first MMO or even the only big MMORPG out there before WoW came out).

Before WoW EQ had no instanced content (had to camp every mob spawn), mobs were rare especially the ones you wanted to take on on the later levels and it's name was a bit of an oxymoron as it barely had any quests.

WoW pretty much "invented" the modern quest based leveling instanced content PVE-Theme-Park MMO genre, and people who played WoW Beta/Alpha know just how much it changed it pretty much started as an EQ clone questing was scarce Blizzard initially planned to have about 30 quests from 1-60, then said it will take a 100, but eventually the figured out the correct formula (even with having orders of magnitude more content than any other game at the time it still was an utter grind to get to 60 in vanilla some people took months to level to that).

WoW initially launched with more content than any MMO on the market which is something that will not and could not ever be repeated again, they launched at an almost perfect a storm sort to speak, as all of the late 90's fresh 2000's MMO's were dying out due to lack of content and game play becoming stagnant.

If SOE at the time decided instead of working on EQ2 which came too late with too little content (and required a computer from the future to play at high settings not to mention ultra, as even my ATI X800 pro at the time couldn't run it well) and instead worked full steam on putting out content for the original EQ with maybe a slight engine overhaul WoW might not have became the monster it is, however anyone who played / still plays EQ1 will tell you that the best content for it came out after WoW was released and it was almost a direct clone of the WoW style of content delivery and progression.