Game population by the numbers.

[Abriael]

Just because the team was "big" or "impressive" doesn't mean jack. If you can't utilize it, nothing's gonna happen (which is why the game failed...all bark, no bite).

Knowing personally quite a few of the people working at Funcom, I'd be very hard pressed defining any of them as incompetent (besides Godager, I'd guess, but he wasn't THAT bad).

Yes... Which is why you do an open beta. Most, if not all developers know that an open beta is critical for stress-testing as well as marketing potential. There is almost no excuse for all the issues AoC had upon launch.

They had a stress test. But that's normally not enough. The servers get hammered even more at release, and the fact that there are several servers also adds stress on the whole server cluster.
Finally, when you get to an open beta phase, unfortunately it tends to be too late to fix a lot of problems. All you can do is to do a "triage" deciding what's more and less important, and prioritize some of the fixes in the time you have left and then build up from that after release.

Yes, I understand this... but just because they fund ArenaNet doesn't mean they'll have an impact on what ANet develops content or story-wise. In a way, ArenaNet is the art student, NCsoft is the scholarship (or rich parent).

it's not that simple. In every publishing deal, the publisher does get a say on content, some get more, some less, but influence does exist pretty much always. There's absolutely no company in any commercial field that would put their brand on a product without having a firm say on what that product entails or not.
It's a basic concept of brand management.

more than an art student, ArenaNet is a medieval artist, and NCsoft is the sponsor. If the sponsor wanted the artist to put the face of his wife on the virgin Mary, he did just that.

You seem a little optimistic, bud. I'm pretty sure the reason why so many MMOs were rushed while being developed was because everybody wants a slice of the corporate pie after they saw what Blizzard accomplished with WoW. They figure if they can crap out a half-decent product with minimal effort and time that they'll make some profit off of it. Very few MMOs these days are about customer satisfaction and bringing a masterpiece to life. I'm sure some companies were rushed due to your reasonings, but not many. It all comes down to money with most companies.

And ArenaNet wants a slice of that pie as well

Like I said... Stress testing the game is critical for development. The fact that they didn't do that before with AoC is pretty foolish. If they did stress test... how could they not have seen these obvious bugs before?

They did, but as I said, when you get to open beta, there's no going back. You're too near to release, the boxes are already printed, deals with distributors are already sealed, marketing has been already finalized and is already on magazines and media.
I don't think there has ever been a single game that has been delayed after open beta in the history of MMORPG.

I really don't think this was the case. Again, it's money. SE could've afforded to go under development for a little while longer, especially with the feedback they were getting. Any smart corporation would have said "Look, guys, we're getting negative feedback from the beta testers. Maybe we should fix something?" but they didn't.

It's the case (or at leats part of the reason). It's a fact. The co-marketing deals were visible to anyone that visited a Japanese website or saw relevant Japanese media. FFXIV branded PC advertisement was all over the place several months before release already.
There's absolutely no way you can delay a release with that, because you're bound by deals with third party companies.

No, I believe you are mistaken... Richard Gariott's ideas were a little far-fetched to begin with. It wasn't solely NCsoft's doing. I feel like NCsoft would learn by now considering they bombed almost all their published MMOs aside from City of Heroes and Guild Wars... although the developers are more to thank for their games survival than anything.

Actually the "living" environment ArenaNet is developing is quite ambitious, it could be awesome, but it can go horribly wrong, and it is definitely requiring a ton of development resources to get right. It's actually not too different from the premise of Tabula Rasa and their NPC invasions.

I never said they were immune to it. Besides, they have a little bit of an edge considering they're doing all of these fantastic ideas... but with slightly lower graphics settings for a newer gen MMO. They aren't going full-throttle with both graphics and dynamics, and they're aware of what they're capable of. The game will still be beautiful, just slightly less of a poly-count than say FFXIV or the new Star Wars MMO.

Actually their poly-count looks quite radically lower than FFXIV, and a little higher than that shown so far for the SWTOR one. Just a clarification for the sake of precision.

They are basing their opinions off the fact that Anet, delivered.....continues to deliver, and has no signs of not delivering in the future. That knows how to please a more casual , western, gaming audience.

You mean like Mythic did with DAOC?

Yeah, we're been there already. Past games guarantee nothing. This not to mention that Guild Wars (that actually isn't even a full fledged MMORPG) is much, much simpler and less ambitious than GW2.

Just as DAOC was less ambitious than Warhammer Online (actually the difference is smaller here).