The best MMO setting, the worst failure.

Age of Conan had an awesome premise, a solid amount of lore, a brutally gritty fantasy setting, and what happened? Funcom happened. They had existing intellectual property, bought the rights to make a game with it, and failed. Utterly, completely failed. I played for two months, reaching a respectable level in both a Cimmerian Barbarian (of course :) ) and a Tempest of Set, and found both lacking in one thing: balance. The "classes" were randomly selected abilities in most cases, and they ended up being either jack-of-all-trade solo classes or uber-powerful engines of destruction. After playing this, WOW and EVE, I had no idea what a good MMO should look like, but this wasn't it. Open world PVP was fine, but it seemed like too much time was spent looking over one's shoulder, and advancement suffered directly as a result. One did not gain XP from killing players, so engaging in PVP was merely for the thrill of the kill, which was enough for me, but lack of advancement meant I could not compete with higher level players. Overall, whomever had the biggest gang in the area won everything, but everyone avoided them so it must have been tedious even for those at the top. Incentive management is key to good PVP; it must be worthwhile otherwise what's the point, and if there's no point to PVP, I won't play it.