Wasn't this the game that ended up being accused of being a fraud, in that you couldn't unsubscribe and they kept charging the credit cards of those who'd signed up, even after cancelling? Think the devs also went AWOL at some point. Or was that another game.
I think you're thinking of another MMO around the same time that I can't remember the name of, it was something like Malevolence Online. There was a huge drama thread on mmorpg.com about it, the creators literally sent people cd-r burn discs of their game and some guy was sleeping in the room with the server because it crashed so often. I wish I could remember the name.