Scott J points to some pretty harsh commentary directed to the Age of Conan team.

I have to say I’m familiar with the phenomena. When you have millions of people using your site, each of whom has a lot of time, you get a collective results of million hours worth of feedback every month. Now that’s fine and useful most of the time, except when it turns to silly things like defacing wikipedia pages about the product (there’s a bit over 5000 edits on english Wikipedia Habbo page alone), or scamming other users to “get even”. So, I feel the pain the AoC dev team must be experiencing.

It’s been interesting to read the commentary of AoC all over the web, given I’ve not played the game myself. The bit that I disagree with, is the notion that the company intentionally put out a bad product out because they thought they can just rely on the franchise. I don’t believe that for a second. What they were probably aiming for is a killer product, and they just didn’t have the skill to deliver. The biggest fail in in the project seems to have been overspending on the look and feel, compared to the resourcing in the programming and design of the actual game. That in turn indicates whomever made the calls on the resourcing failed, so most of the team really is not to blame.

(Incidentally, I apologize for yet another breakage for some readers. I had accidentally not converted the URL most people see to use the Feedburner version, so most readers were still getting the old crappy feed. I promise to stop fiddling this for now.)