Sorry, busy busy.
To address the whole thread in one swoop:
Deciding when to release a big software project is always an interesting balancing act. You always release with bugs, and you typically have features that you had to cut to get it to launch.
There are obviously times when someone launches too early - i.e., they believe that they are launching with too many bugs/lack of features to make the product unviable.
The alternative - launching too late - is a rarity, though it does happen.
When we started Pirates, we had a very different scope than what we wound up with. There's an entire world of why we added this feature, cut that one, but suffice to say, we got more and more excited by the direction we were taking the project.
About a year out from ship we had settled on what our final feature set would be, and worked away on that. Because we're a smaller scale project, we picked the things we would be strong at, rather than try to do too much. That was PvP as our end game, ship combat, and the economy.
When we chose to release the game it was because we thought that we'd achieved the necessary stability, performance, and fun that justified the price of the game. You can argue that we didn't hit it (and we are the first to admit that there were some mistakes there), but largely we think we achieved what we were shooting for.
If you were looking for us to have the polish of WoW, you were crazy. They’ve been out for a few years, and had a staggeringly huge budget. We can’t compete on their level, but that’s why we chose to do something different. Our goal was to create a different kind of MMO than what people had played, and while it wouldn’t have the same production values as WoW, it would present a new experience that would appeal to people who were tired of the same old MMO experience that they’d been playing since EQ 1. I think of it as Evil Dead compared to Top Gun. Evil Dead doesn’t have the same lighting, the effects, the sets, etc. What it does have is a very different, quirky take on the world, one that I really enjoy, appreciate, and am willing to pay for.
The danger we have in the industry is that if everybody evaluates new MMOs next to WoW, then there’s going to be WoW, maybe Warhammer, and Bioware’s next project. There won’t be independent, different MMOs coming out because the production on them is simply too high to try and do novel approaches.
So, with that said, of course we’re going to continue polishing the game and improving the experience. And while you may not always get you want, if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need. Oh yeahhhh.