Seriously? No mail box?

[Rutelor]

I think SE really pushed tanaka to release this game, making this game really (at first) unplayable.

This purely conjectural and rather unfounded assumption is one of the most tiresome urban legends ever! Tanaka oversaw the design of the game, Tanaka produced the game. He wasted 6 years and 35 million dollars. The buck stopped with him. Stop inventing little stories to defend someone you had (for whatever reasons) tender feelings for; instead, wake up and face reality.

Why would the company force a company founder and Senior Vice-President (of Software Development, no less) to publish, if he had even hinted that they shouldn't? He was the one that didn't make what probably was his own release schedule. And mind you, he was nowhere near making it. BTW, even if the schedule wasn't his, 6 years is far from an unreasonable timetable to design and publish a game from scratch.

It is also definitely far from unreasonable to expect that a game produced within that period would have oodles of systems people anywhere would expect any other similar game to have; systems that this game lacked at release, and (because of the twisted and confused miasma Tanaka left as underlying structure for it) still continues to lack today. To begin with, unless a feature was deemed unsuccessful in XI, this game was expected to have it, certainly after 6 years. Why were (forget about mailboxes,) adequate commerce facilities, questing, player and item search, housing, mounts & transports, and fundamental commands (like /assist or /target) absent, even from ß testing? Was that "SE forcing Tanaka" also?

In the process of moving away from its disastrous launch and a first few months mired in denial, it is crucial for the game that the player community does not deceive itself as to the reasons for such inauspicious beginnings. Nothing more hurtful to the future of the game than the misapprehension of what got us there to begin with. We've got to move away from the story that tells that Tanaka's game could have been great if he had only been given the time and resources to bring it about. He had 6 years (and 35 million dollars.)

R

[Youngblood]

This purely conjectural and rather unfounded assumption is one of the most tiresome urban legends ever! Tanaka oversaw the design of the game, Tanaka produced the game. He wasted 6 years and 35 million dollars. The buck stopped with him. Stop inventing little stories to defend someone you had (for whatever reasons) tender feelings for; instead, wake up and face reality.

R

Tanaka. Failed. Period. He had 6 years and 35 big ones to do this project. I don't see anywhere that the company rushed him to such a poor release. So yah I agree with this statement.