[dirty bunny]

Over the last few months I've tried both Rift and Star Wars: The Old Republic on a trial basis.
Rift sucks. In almost every way it's inferior to World of Warcraft, which it closely emulates. There are a number of different "classes" like WoW, which you customize (like wow). But the casting/action animations look stiff, the colour is washed-out looking, the quests are boring, and most of the classes closely resemble those in WoW. Not that wow was all original, but Rift feels like the cheap Chinese-made dollar store knock off a popular toy. If you never had the real thing, it'd probably be okay.

Star Wars: The Old Republic is a much different animal. It's more story-driven, much less about being an MMORPG. It feels like a single-player game, at least to the point where I had to quit. There were things I didn't like about it, but all in all I had fun playing it. I was debating whether to let my wow sub lapse and play SW:TOR instead. In the end I stayed with wow, and found a lot of people in my guild (in wow) ended up quitting Star Wars after a while. One thing I really liked about Star Wars was the option of how to turn in your quest. You could make "dark/evil/bad" choices or "good/nice" choices. They didn't always mesh with what I considered bad, but it's still a neat idea.

Knowing WoW though, they are probably ready to leap on any innovations other MMOs make and see if they can steal them and integrate them into their game.