I lol'd at seeing this thread, and the fact it keeps getting resurrected, but I know why it will probably keep getting resurrected...
I left UO for DAoC when it launched in 2001. It was seriously an awesome game and remained that way for a few years. They got two things right, a sense of community and hands down the best mass pvp system ever put into a game, it scaled beautifully.
Who doesn't love the idea of rushing at a keep and trying to siege it with friends while the other side, who didn't know you were coming more often than not, had to scramble the alert to get people out to the frontier to defend. For those less interested in the grind of working a character up there was a mid game PvP system that was also awesome starting at level 19... even I'm guilty of rolling new toons just to get them to those BGs and then deleting them and starting over to get back there again(you leveled out eventually).
I don't think it was WoW that killed DAoC, people left in droves after a bad expansion(Trials of Atlantis) forced a whole new level of grind pain by adding artifacts that needed a grind to activate and another grind to empower. A dozen trials, most requiring big groups, for each artifact and each character... and the RvR(realm vs realm) was out of reach until you had done a whole lot of stuff you didn't particularly want to do.
I tried their 10 day return for free program a few months ago, it was still busy on Ywain 1, but the mass RvR is gone. The other change, that NOBODY asked for or wanted, was a complete re-work of the frontier to where you can't run out your gates to get to the keeps anymore. The old RvR zones, like Emain, also became empty as people were forced into new map layouts and it sucked.
They got rid of the port to the keep, a 15 min wait on "the pad", but replaced it with an even longer boat ride that you had to jump off of at just the right time.. which was worse. DAoC 2001-2004/5 was amazing, it's not that game anymore except on free servers who play the original rules only. I loved that game...