Massively

Dude, Garriot had nothing to do with the cancellation. For crying out loud, it was cancelled in spite of his objections. You want to blame somebody, blame the investors... the cancellation was because it wasn't making as much money as they'd wanted.

Maybe Sony will pick it up, it certainly can't do more poorly than MxO.

On the contrary, Richard was smart in cutting himself from this title. What i do not condone was Richard blowing off the known problems and not firing people dragging the game down. He could have saved TR but chose instead to cut losses and run, again he could have hired the right folks or some temps to come in and address the problems.

These include but were not restricted to:

1. Literaly HUNDREDS, yes hundreds of buggy or broken quests because of multiple paths.
2. Customer service >never< replying to subscriber complaints or sending an email about a ticket several months later "are you still experiencing this problem?".
3. GM's with attitudes, I received one of these personaly "Now what do you want me to give you",
being an opening GM line.
4. Zero missions from 46 to 50 with a few fillins after 49. Not addressed until for several months, and then still not fixed.
5. GM's that would simply credit mission completions after you were tens of levels past, not taking into consideration the level and lack of exp advancement. (this contributed to the huge gap from 46 to 50)
6. storyline and content removed midseason and then reinserted, broke even more storyline missions (mainline, not sidemissions)

This is why TR failed, >lousy< devs (no balls) and even worse customer service makes for cancelled subs.

All things being equal the naysayers that will harp on about the poor devs being badgered or abused is that current persons responsibility and crime, not the next consumer they speak to looking for help.

In the end as i have said before, weak minds make poor decisions and will destroy a business. Folks will after failing enough times that being a crony or a good ol boy doesnt mix well in business, and will eventually destroy it because the hard choices to fire and hire folks wasnt made when they needed to be.

I have not experienced any of the problems you mentioned, DEVs and GMs were particularly fast and helpful throughout the games duration.

Last year, Massively readers had an opportunity to give their opinion on which MMOGs had the best admins. TR won that one by a landslide.

Oh right, because there is no way a publisher could screw up a game by meddling with the game design/content, pushing it out the door early, failing to advertise it, killing morale on the dev team through a half dozen rounds of layoffs, or any number of issues. It's always the devs fault!

You know, it sure seems like NCSoft has had a bad run of luck with hiring "crappy developers". Seems like they've had at least a half dozen flops or cancelled projects in a row with the only success stories being games they purchase after they were very nearly complete.

You still want to stand by your statement that it is always the developers fault and not the publishers fault?

I can understand where you're coming from, but in some cases publishers impose theirselves far too often. TR, WAR, those are a couple of games that come to mind when it comes to publisher failings. The best games are self published or published by those who have invested nothing more than printing discs and distributing the game(blizzard, turbine, bioware, etc).