I left UO to play SWG as in the Original days SWG was UO:2 with the Star Wars IP. UO's greatest strength was that you could change your class. Its not like WOW where a Mage is a Mage is a Mage. You could mix parts of the Mage skill set with that of the warrior and with the pet handler and create your own combination. Sure there were cookie cutter builds but by the time you changed your character to that build a new cookie cutter build had gained popularity. People became good at PVP not by changing their skills every two weeks but learning to master the skills that they had chosen to learn for best effect. IMO while UO stays away from Archetype based characters it will maintain its niche.
It really depends a lot on the game. In Ultima Online you had a system where you could take a bunch of runes and mark them at a location and then teleport to that location later on. To do this you needed to have some magic skill which meant less points you could spend on other things. For the non mages other ingame crafters could make Rune Books and sell them and also scrolls of teleportation and Portal. Its not a technical problem and more developer laziness. SWG even has a reward that is an instant transport ship that people could obtain.
In WOW the mages can do the same things but just to specified town locations. Still in WoW Engineers can make transporters to a couple of other locations. Yes not everything in WoW is as good as it could be but its the unfortunate yard stick that others try to measure up to.
Don't discount the value of providing an AV app as a part of Windows Update. Even if anti trust measures etc come into play a lot of users will install it as its "there".
I am in Australia and have two WOW accounts merged into the one Battle.Net account. Along with my D1, D2 and D2:LOD keys.
I think the US means WOW US Servers.
Software production is assumed to be a line function, but it is run like a staff function. -- Paul Licker