It must be a designated fun day.

As seen on Q23, it seems that SOE forgot to charge for more than a year those players paying Planetside with game time cards.

Maybe its time to reveal one of your biggest mistakes in the history of this game? The one that nobody seemed to take notice of, mainly because nobody from Sony would reveal it. For the first 12 months of the game, people were playing for -free-.

You botched the subscription system.

Game Cards didn’t expire. You let an incalculable (except to you) amount of people play the game for free, for a year PLUS, and you did NOTHING about it.

It would keep you in a state of constant: “Cancelled” but would never “Close” your account.

Beside the screams and the actual real impact of this “glitch”, there’s a comment from Roger Wong that I consider trustworthy:

It’s true that devs have been leaving left and right, though. I know of five who resigned last Friday. In all, they’ve lost about 16 devs in the past 6 weeks.

And, as Mark Asher asked, where they going?

EDIT – Some more details (about SOE, not Planetside itself):

The talented, disgruntled devs weren’t fired. They quit. Last Friday, for example, SOE lost a lead designer, their lead 3d graphics guy, their lead client guy, their lead database guy, and their tech director.

The lost a bunch of other people the previous Friday too, one of who is coming to work for us. I haven’t met the guy yet, but I’ll ask him on Monday if he’s under NDA, and if so, when it runs out.