True, Sony's primary purpose is to make money for their shareholders. And true, businesses generally do examine the level of customer satisfaction that they perceive to exist. This is true of all business.

The thing that makes Sony/VI suspect in this case is that they are intentionally trying to build a custoemr base that will play whatever VI slops onto their plate, paying the $13 per month (or $40, if they REALLY have too much money on their hands and they choose to play on Stormhammer), regardless of the fact that the level of service that they're being provided is declining steadily.

If you look at the changes that have been made to the game recently, I think you'll find that the only commonality that the changes share is that they make it easier for new players to get addicted to the game. Prior to the March 19 patch, there was a very real danger of players becoming frustrated with what they perceived as an excessively difficult game and walking away before they actually started getting involved with any content that was fun or meaningful. Now that they can level to 20 in the blink of an eye and don't have to bother with CRs until they're over 10, and now that any level 14 cleric or 22 pally can revive them, there's no challenge whatsoever involved, just an immense feeling of accomplishment that they've gotten to level N so quickly, while everyone else on the server is telling stories about how difficult it was for them just to get to their second round of spells and how they had to walk uphill through the snow just to get to the merchant, and by God, they paid in COPPER, none of this pansy-*** platinum. So, they get sucked into the game and end up spending all their time in a chair, feeling their butt grow while they play EQ. Sounds an awful lot like "give it away for free, then sell it to whoever comes back", doesn't it?

And while VI is spending time patching the game to suck in every last person who is truly devoid of life, so they can get that extra $13 to the bottom line, what are they doing about bugs? How many people have died because of the "8^1 yells for help from behind you" problem? How many have died because of the complete heal problem? Problems that actually AFFECT players. Then, someone finds out that there's a bug that can be exploited which allows chanters to 1-in-10 end up with a free bar of platinum when they use enchant platinum. Servers go down IMMEDIATELY, because this is clearly a life-and-death problem that must be solved immediately. Can't have level 34 players making a couple thousand plat an hour by doing something tedious- that would clearly unbalance the entire economy...suddenly, everyone would be on horses with chain bridles, the entire server would band together and kill every boss mob in one giant, all-encompassing raid, Inkies and Wood Elves would be living together, it would be anarchy. God forbid a player should ever have an advantage.

VI's aim is clear: Build a customer base (by recruiting new players and conditioning existing ones) that just doesn't give a damn about what VI is or is not doing for them, as long as they can have their daily escape into Norrath.

Personally, I went with your second option. I quit the game- gave away all my stuff, deleted my chars, cancelled my account, and uninstalled the software.

-aye