By not listening to people who knew.
To be really successful, a AAA MMORPG needs the following at release.
- 6-12 months worth of quest content for the average player.
- A team solely dedicated to raiding.
- A team solely dedicated to PVP.
- 2-3 teams solely dedicated to new content, working independently. Some expansion, some free content, some generic silly stuff.
- A team primarily dedicated to bug fixing, but which can be used to plug holes elsewhere.
- A dificulty level that lets content development keep up with the majority of players.
Bioware was in the unique position that they could omfortably have paid for all of this, yet they implemented none of it.
After levelling my first toon to 50 during prerelease (empire 3rd to level 50 on TOFN), I knew that the formula they had come up with wouldn't work. The relationship between the hours the developers spent on content and the time it took players to buzz through it, simply didn't scale.