The lack of information and the abruptness of the game being announced for launch without any sort of publicly known beta testing prior to now is something I have a lot of concern over. Especially when SOE is pretty bad about fixing problems in it's games after they've launched.

Everquest had repeated screwed up launches for at least 5 expansion packs...and the game launch with server load issues. But it also had problems related to loot being given to the highest sole damage doer that were in there for almost 6 months if I recall.

Then Everquest 2, they basically took everything about EQ threw it out the window and slapped the EQ name on it. It may be more related to EQ now, but EQ2 was nothing like the original on launch... if it had been called anything but Everquest 2 you wouldn't have known they were supposed to be the same world/history/etc. As for bugs, it wasn't the best performing game and I just flat out didn't like it enough to play more than a couple days.

Then they bought Vanguard, which was basically a broken game on release. They spent a year on it and still hadn't fixed a lot of the client crashing bugs. Now it withers away, with one developer working on it from what I've read.

They also had a poor history with Planetside. It had a too high monthly fee for what it was and had very poor support and additions. You basically paid for additions on top of the monthly fee and had servers that lagged like hell.

And SOE tries to overly monetize stuff in their games. Used to have the special EQ servers where people paid like double and triple the monthly fee for "special" access to them. Having weird exceptions to their "All Access Subscription"....etc.

They might actually have some lively games if they just relaxed a little on squeezing every last penny out of their customers and provided a good value. Probably end up with a lot of station access pass or whatever they call it subscriptions increased original box sales...and generally more people playing their games would attract more people.

But this "3 months till launch" and a beta only happening 2-2.5 months prior to launch to a degree that will stress their servers is not inspiring confidence in a company that has a history of screwing up and generally boning their customers.


And I completely left out Star Wars Galaxies....which some say it was Lucas Arts.....but that was just a colossal fuck up.