Also worth noting that this was peak blizzard. Not only did people love the Warcraft games, people were also obsessed with diablo (especially diablo 2) which came out a few years prior. So blizzard had a ton of good credit with the public when WoW was released, and a lot of people probably realized hey this whole mmo thing is fun, just cause it was new to them.
So no I don't think it's a successor to EQ. They took the formula and slapped an established IP into it that they knew would sell. Hardly surprised it did so well, but in a way that's because people already loved EQ and the original Warcraft games, not necessarily WoW on it's own merits.
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