I was sitting around messing a lil with Aion since I managed to get a free copy when I picked up my new laptop, when I stopped and begun noticing how it really is kinda like WoW but for certain reasons, more appealing and stopped and thought- Wait, just because it is considered a WoW clone- should that seriously matter?
Stop and think a moment. Think WAY back during old NES, SNES, etc times or rather, back during DOS, Windows 3.1, 95, etc...
When you picked up Final Fantasy after Dragon Quest was released and was the first game in that area and a smash hit- did was it right to complain "Well it was a Dragon Quest clone".
When Warcraft, Command and Conquer, then many other RTS games come out, all very similar but with their own small differences, did you stop and say "Hey, this is just like Dune 2 which was first released back in 92 which help gave root to the genre?
When you guys played your standard FPS games like Doom and such... did you ever stop and say "Hey this is just like Wolfenstein 3D"- or possibly even one of its similar counterparts? Or hell in the multiplayer FPS variations of Halo, UT, Quake, old school Jedi Knights...
Hell you get the point.
What I am getting at is a LOT of games are knock offs with their own touch that appeals to different crowds.... So what? Some people find these knock offs much more appealing than the original because it has personalized tweaks to make it more special... And lets face it, MMO over the last 14ish years went through a lot since UO basically broke foot in what is today's MMOs into mainstream as opposed to smaller scale variations or otherwise, and since then we really have limited variations in our popular 'rpg' tags which tbh- is there really THAT much difference between regular RPGs? Don't get me wrong many of these games have their own private market they gear towards, and some of these 'clones' fix what people may complain about the 'original'. So seriously... Is there really THAT much bad when you get a new game out it is similar to a successful game in many ways? Its pretty much how games been since the beginning after all. Just a random thought.