I'm looking at RIFT for long-term potential, and for the lower "price of admission".

I never got heavily into WOW, although I tried it a couple of times before the first expansion came out. Now, the thought of starting up from scratch in a game that established is pretty daunting.

With the RIFT, I expect that there will be a lack of polish compared to a game that has been around for 5+ years. However, I also look at my experiences in games past where a patch or expansion comes around and the playability for a specific class or spec has gotten heavily nerfed. What do you do then? You generally have to re-roll and level up a new character/set of characters. With the RIFT, I can level up 4 teams and have pretty well unlimited flexibility to adapt to any future patches that change the current classes/abilities. Coming from a game like DAOC, where to get that level of flexibility, you'd have to level up 10+ characters / account just for a single realm, this is a huge selling point for me.

Do I have concerns about the long-term viability of the game? Sure, but that's going to come with just about any new game. And nothing new is going to come out that has the same level of depth and polish as WOW purely from the maturity of the game itself, and the continual re-investment of the operating budget. But, in my case, that's also a drawback.