[KaVir]

To be fair, burnout among players is something faced by every mud, regardless of whether it's graphical or text-based. To , "even for the most compelling of virtual worlds, players will eventually leave", and as Raph Koster , "the population distribution across MMOs tends to look like a classic “long tail” graph".

Personally I think Blizzard have done exceptionally well to maintain the top spot for so long, but they won't hold it forever, and when they are finally overtaken I suspect we'll see WoW's popularity plummet as the long tail re-establishes itself.