Sorry to be your first transgressor Akuma, but I doubt I'd ever pay for a Sony MMO again.
EQ was good, very good, I played it for almost 4 years (I think, hard to remember sometimes). I've also tried every other MMO they've released and unfortunately they have a habit of radically changing elements and pissing off customers. Also, their habit of releasing new expansions at an insane rate doesn't help much either. EQ eventually became too buggy for me to enjoy, and to stay ont he cutting edge you had to get the 3-4 expansions they released every year. EQ2 went from being a very good game (I chose it over WoW) to being a completely different game 3 months later. All the parts that were fun got changed and IMO for the worse. SWG was good at the beginning as well but turned into a total mess soon after (though I seem to remember they fixed many of the problems later on). Planetside was decent for an MMO FPS, but it was laggy as hell and hard to progress in unless you played constantly.
I think I might have missed one or two in there someplace, but the essential progression has been the same time and again. Start out with a good idea and then screw around with it until it becomes something totally different.
Now, ignoring gameplay, they also had constant technical problems. Every EQ patch meant weeks to months of unstable servers that made it hard to play, or had massive amounts of both network and graphical lag. Then they'd spend the next 3 months fixing all the bugs they introduced with the latest expansion...just in time to release the next one which started the process over again. Playing in the first few days of any expansion was next to impossible as you had massive disconnects and most servers were taken down repeatedly for emergency patches in those first days. On top of that, but SOE rarely if ever refunded subscription money for that downtime. I can remember only one time where I got anything from them in compensation and that was because the servers were down for like 48 hours strait.
Contacting technical support was often like pulling nails...assuming you got anyone at all. The easiest method was by email but that took days normally. In game game masters...you wish. If we had a GM actively answering questions on my EQ server, everyone knew because there would be amazed outcries in public chat channels.
My last problem with SOE and the MMO's they run is that you don't get much for your subscription fee's. New content updates were rare, dynamic content was restricted to a few events a year around major holidays and in general consisted of a specific zone being filled with high level mobs that ran around slaughtering everyone, until high level groups got together and dealt with it (aka, it was more a hassle for everyone but the top end players than a fun event).
Compared to WoW (I only choose WoW because it is the most popular MMO), your 15$ a month is practically wasted. WoW provides numerous interactive events throughout the year, involving new gameplay elements and lots of new activities and quests (though they do become repetitive if you've done them the previous year). On top of that, but they hold a reasonable number of global interactive events, normally situated around major patches. Speaking of the patches, WoW provides regular new content that you don't have to go out and purchase in a store. One expansion up to now with a second one announced in like 3-4 years. In the same period We had a good 9 expansions in EQ, all of which were 30$ to purchase (one side note, this expansion explosion really only happened after SOE took over development from the original team).
Another nice change in WoW is the ingame technical support. In general I get a response in less than half an hour, and unless it is something that needs authorization from someone higher up the chain I get the help I need.
Anyway, if people have other experiences with SOE MMO's, please feel free to share them. I know I'm not an isolated event, nor was I blacklisted in some way, because I've played through most fo the MMO's with about a dozen friends and spent years on one of the top guilds in EQ, they all had similar experiences.
edit: I just looked back and I guess it was only 2 expansions a year in EQ, though it felt like more.
