stay strong, blue.

your old rangers 2040 clannie,

greydog

the last MMO that had a real beta was EQ.
a beta that actually tweaked and changed the game based upon players that worked to make the game enjoyable.
all other "betas" since then have been marketing hype.

the dev's blame this progression on the gamers, that since eq beta days, more players have joined the genre, and thus you have more crap feedback than good feedback and they don't have the time to sift through it. so they hand the "beta" to the promo department and turn it into hype on message forums and contests for 3rd party vendors.

the was a lot of criticism for ac2 during it's beta stages, and news like this proves (to me, i was in there with the critics) that most all of the criticism was ignored which lead to the current downfall.

gaming community's fault, or devs? i say it's still the dev's fault. we're consumers, it's in the very definition of "consumer" to be "unreasonable ignorant jackasses". if you get "nice" consumers, consider yourself lucky. so the dev's faulting that "most of the feedback is crap" are simply admitting "we don't want to sell many copies of this game".

least that's how i see it.

beta'ed and played uo for a year.
beta'ed and played eq for a few years.
beta'ed and played daoc for a bit over a year.

beta'ed but ain't gonna play when release games:
ac.
ao.
ac2.
sb.
swg. <-

more fuel for the fire.