To make matters even worse, a storyfocused MMORPG turned out to be not such a great idea in the first place. So the success of TOR wasnt even that big.
It's not such a bad idea. I mean, FFXIV is pretty successful and its biggest strength is the banger of a story that it leads you through.
The rest of that game is pretty so-so at best.
My experience of TOR was that the individual class stories were pretty decent. But after these short stories it was generic Star Wars slop where Jedi were all incompetent buffoons and all Sith were unrepentent jerkwads. Which is a complete departure from what Bioware had built up in KotoR 1/2 with their emphasis on Grey Jedi and Darth Malak's (Potential) redemption.
Designing game rulesystems that work well isnt that easy, even if many people seem to be gloriously ignorant about this problem. On the one hand you want to give the player the flexibility to create an unique character, on the other hand you want the game to be balanced. This is not an easy problem to solve at all.
It's not just flexibility vs balance either.
It's being about being complex enough to allow for the flexibility. While still being accessible to people who have limited experience with the genre. (Since targeting only hardcore fans will lead to limited overall success)
