1. Over hyped MMO nears its release. Hype drunken fanboys scream "wow killer on day one"
2. Game launches with a massive playerbase. Hype drunken fanboys roar louder than than the raging thunder
3. First 2 weeks pass and the forums start having negative threads which are quickly drowned into an ocean of fanboys coming out of the woodwork to defend the game with arguments such as "the game is new", "this isn't wow", "it will be fixed".
4. First month has passed and the playerbase halved in the mean time. More negative threads start popping up about issues that have yet to be fixed. The fanboys are hard pressed to defend the game. Same several posters can now be seen in all negative threads defending the game with their lives and making people wonder if they aren't actually from the dev company staff doing damage control.
5. Two months have passed and the playerbase is dragging along, barely 33% of what it was at release. Negative threads are barely combated, as fanboys have now become apologists claiming WoW had 10 years to shape up.
6. 3 months have now passed and the demand for server mergers can no longer be ignored. The fanboys now claim that all the people who left were wow kids and the game will do better without them.
7. 6 months-1 year later game is f2p. Fanboys claim that f2p is better than p2p anyway.

Wildstar is now at stage 4.