I hit 38 last night and it's still hella fun but yeah, far from finished. My take is that they spent 4 years developing, ran low on cash, and were also trying to hit the market at the right time (before WotLK and Warhammer). So, a buggy release gives them the cashflow to finish it out as well as get it into people's hands before the competition. Was it the 'right' thing to do? All engineer's worth a sh*t will say no, most business people would say yes. It is a gamble though, can they fix enough stuff fast enough now to prevent a significant number of people from getting fed up and /quit.

When I cancelled my WoW accounts I did so with the full intention of renewing once WotLK came out, but after playing this I'm really not so sure. Just the thought of the rep grind, instance grind, raid grind, PvP grind, etc... really not interested anymore. Does that mean I'll be playing AoC for years? Iono, the end game will tell, as well as how quickly and effectively they finish out what we've already got. If the end game raids are anything like WoW's, then I'm done, done, DONE. If they take as long as Blizz does to introduce new (non raid) content after 80% of the server is max level, then I'm done. If all this means that I just have to swap MMO's every year (because that's pretty much the only genre I enjoy playing regularly) then that's what I'll do.

Anyway, sorry to get off on a tangent there.