On the day that the fourth World of Warcraft expansion was released, Blizzard was asked about TOR’s switch to Free 2 Play. It came in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz with Mike Morhaime where the question about TOR came up, as switching to Free 2 Play within a year of launch is generally seen as a failure. Blizzard definitely had an opinion what caused subscriptions to drop so rapidly:

Mike Morhaime: It’s something that a lot of MMOs struggle with. Probably if they had to do it over again they might have held the game over and worked on the end game content a bit more. One of the things people will notice with Mists of Pandaria in comparison to our other expansions is the variety of things there are to do; it will feel like a bigger, meatier expansion compared to Cataclysm.

Ask any TOR player who quit after launch, and they’ll tell you the same thing. They spent too much time hyping up the voice acting, and not enough time delivering a meaty endgame to keep people playing after they hit the level cap.