They should have kept developing the "fourth pillar"

"Mutiplayer" is the second M in the genre's name. Seems pretty black and white to me.

Yes, but this is where their focus needs to be now. Not warzones, not Ops. Yes, F2P messed some things up, but it's been a year and we've not had any new story -- and they wonder why people left?

The development strategy of concentrating on story failed.
The development strategy of being able to solo everything has failed in every MMO except WoW.

The development strategy of focusing only on story did not fail. It failed because they did what WAR did and tried to have something for everyone, even though the game was clearly advertised to cater one specific playstyle.

For example, WAR was advertised as an RvR game. This would be the MMO for the PvP playerbase. However, what was launched was a mess of boring and dull PvE content, extremely easy leveling, no endgame and some RvR tacked on. Mythic later acknowledged that they should have stuck to their original guns and made it an RvR game, period. When they went the WoW route, the game failed.

Same thing happened with SWTOR. The game was advertised as a story driven MMO. What we got instead was a really cool leveling experience and a story that ended at max level, then the standard MMO crap that few enjoy. Had the developers just made this game about the story, it would have catered to the people that came here - they would know exactly who their audience was and what they wanted. Instead they try to be everything to everyone.

And that never works.

no by internet standards every mmo has failed except wow

every new mmo on the market would not focus on story and being able to solo to endgame if it was a failed design, pretty sure the indusrty has seen story and solo questing as a way to get people to play their game, retention might be a diffrent story but name one mmo that released recently or is releasing soon that has no focus on story or playing solo

A much higher percentage of "old" MMO's that relied on group content not only succeeded, they have been cash cows for their publishers for 10+ years.

The vast majority of "new" MMO's fail from launch and very few of them will even be remembered 10 years from now except as examples of "what not to do".

A much higher percentage of "old" MMO's that relied on group content not only succeeded, they have been cash cows for their publishers for 10+ years.

The vast majority of "new" MMO's fail from launch and very few of them will even be remembered 10 years from now except as examples of "what not to do".

Also 10+ years ago is when the genre was becoming popular. Nowadays the market is so saturated and that is the one of the reason why few will be remembered. People jump from one mmo to another and few make the long term commitment that players used to do in games like EQ, Ultimate online, etc. If WoW was to be released today it is likely that it wouldn't have caught the same amount of success in the current market (remember how the very vanilla WoW was in 2004, now imagine that being released today). This game has definitely had some influence in the genre though. I'm already seeing MMOs take bigger importance in story and voice overs which no one dared to do much about before.

You can pretty much bet that had TOR's dud status been known 2 or 3 years ago, nobody would be putting story and cinematics in the games.