1st guild, What drove my real life friends away:

1. Lag and bugs.
2. Awe inspiring slowness of fixing those bugs.
3. Incomplete implementation of tiers 2 and 3.
4. Inconsistant implementation of bug fixes and new 'events'.

Hit one month, miss one or two... hit another, kinda.... outstanding bugs that were SUPPOSED to be fixed... etc...

Many of us were developers and it bugged the heck out of us ( and STILL bugs the heck out of me ) when there would be a patch, and notes would be incomplete, missing, incorrect, and there would appear to be NO QA or version control. Same bugs kept appearing and dissapearing.

----

2nd guild, others left because there were many months in a row of no event... they hit as high a level as they wanted, and had nothing else to work on. No new exploration, nothing to hunt for, and nothing to work on, they slowly left quietly.

---

Things that will drive ME away. Keep in mind I've been through this game since the end of beta and been here through thick and thin.

- If winter hits and they havn't fixed the current blight patch and pushed it to live. Shows they don't have the resources or the ability to keep development on the game and without that hope, I will go.

- In the SHORTER term, if they don't addresss the questions about the billing to my satisfaction, then I will NOT give them my billing info. I DID try on the 1st. After noticing it was a standard HTTP form, and that the datafile was not properly CHMODed I didn't fill it out. I sent a note. FWIW, I DIDN'T see CC info, just contact info. This was a MISTAKE, I am not reading anything more or less from that. But what I have concerns about is that they have not (even 3 days later) come forward with an OFFICIAL statement one way or another about the mistake, or to do damage control. IRC does NOT count, nor does popping into MP for a few words. I'm talking Login Page or Forums.

- If the forums go away and are not replaced, that will be a big strike against them. I don't think they consider communications en masse an important thing. I have no doubt about their enthusiasm, as they have more than exposed themselves to IMs, In game chats, PHONE CALLS, and emails. But they are not handling the 'public' in general very well.

*I* suspect that come the end of whatever billing period for the server hostings comes and goes, and becomes deliquent, that the boards will go POOF. The old owners didn't pull the plug, but I don't think they will keep footing the bills either.

My 2c.

I don't want to go, but if they don't iron things out, there really isn't much choice.

-HratLi