Yea, GoD was an awesome expansion - everyone loved it, people were just tired of EQ.
Wait no, GoD was terrible, which caused a mass exodus towards WoW, on top of that SoE managed to cannibalize what was left of EQ1s playerbase later in 2004, by launching EQ2, which simply wasn't a sequel to EQ1, a huge mistake by itself.
Launching a shitty product in the same year your competition is launching their new game, and cannibalizing your own playerbase, in the same year .. its actually amazing EQ1 survived 2004, despite SoEs retarded moves.
In hindsight I can only conclude that SoE wanted to kill EQ1 by launching GoD in the way they did, hoping everyone would move over to EQ2 so they could focus on that game .. but of course the core game of EQ2 didn't appeal to the hardcore EQ1 crew .. which happened to be the people that bothered to struggle through GoD, so that plan failed, and they ended up with two games with a low-medium population, neither game deserving the investments necessary to compete with WoW.
That, or they were just actually full retard.
E
Elidroth
I'm actually curious about your view on these events, perhaps it wasn't all bad?
EQ ran out of favor with consumers like 15 years ago ;p
It absolutely didn't, notice how progression servers are still very popular these days.
The EQ of 2004 ran out of favor due to above reasons .. EQ itself did not.