Give me a break, Convo. I know you really want this game to succeed, but I've read your posts and you're a smart guy - take off the McQuaid-colored goggles.
First, when it comes to clarity of vision, EQN is in a totally different ballpark than Pantheon. In fact, Brad should have looked hard at their SOE Live presentation and taken a page from that book. Regardless of what you think about the quality of EQN's design goals and ideas, they were presented brilliantly and in crystal-clear fashion. Ponytail came out and, with great passion, stated everything he and his team thought was wrong or underdeveloped with MMOs, translated those thoughts into "pillars" of how they wanted to evolve the genre (life of consequence, destructability, changing world, and evolving the core game) and then gave a specific example of each (emergent AI, voxels, rallying calls, and multi-classing/deck building/horizontal progression.)
The ironic thing is that Brad has always attempted to associate himself with being a visionary, but the thing is, there's no vision here. Or, best case scenario (and I don't know why we'd give him the benefit of the doubt by applying a best case scenario, but whatever), he's building the vision as he goes forward. All we heard in the beginning is he wanted something like EverQuest that had a lot of grouping. That was his pitch. And, oh yeah, he's Brad McQuaid.
This is far more than just a communication problem. This is a vision problem.
Imagine if he were pitching a sitcom. This is what it would be like:
"Hey guys, I'm writing a sitcom. It's going to be like Friends, but with a bit of Seinfeld."
"Ok, what's the plot?"
"..."
"Who are the characters?"
"Let me get back to you in 48 hours... (48 hours later) Ok, so there's a Ross and a Rachel, and a Chandler, but there's no Joey."
"But we love Joey, we really want a Joey character in the show. I'm not sure if we can give you money for this since there's no Joey."
"Just kidding guys, there IS a Joey. He's part of the Chandler character. See? Innovation! Vision!"
The way they handled the entire warrior/crusader thing is so indicative of the fact there hasn't been a vision at all. Someone with a vision sees complaints and says, "You know what, I hear you guys, but we made this decision because of X, Y, and Z." Or they might say, "You know everyone, our vision was X, Y, and Z, but you all make a good point. So we're going to find a way to incorporate warriors into that vision."
What they don't do is say, "Uhhh yeah... actually, that was part of our vision all along, guys! We just didn't reveal it yet! But here it is! Yeah! See, we're thinking really far ahead!"
And that's the issue. Not that they're adding things to the game as they go along. It's that they came into this with the fucking hubris that Brad's name alone would be enough to carry it, were totally unprepared, totally vision-less (from the guys who claim vision is everything), and are now pretending that their vision is far more concrete than it actually is (see: combat update) and hoping that everyone following them is too fucking stupid or naive to notice.
They're charlatans, preying on the nostalgia of their audience.
