John Smedley is doing an IAMA on reddit (You can ask him anything)
 

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comment...ustry_veteran/

For those who are interested

I'm already in the PS2 beta, and after seeing some of those fervent questions about day 1 beta keys, I'm glad I was already selected.

And if that's really smed, he knows how to play his audience. I was came away impressed.

nice, sounds like a new eq type game is coming down the pipe, Everquest Next.

that start yet? How is it? :) I had fun with ps1

That's been known for quite some time haha

I'm under NDA and very paranoid, so I won't do a full run down :) . But I am very impressed with it. Right now the tech test is little more than run, shoot, and capture bases, but I'm still really impressed. I'll be fascinated when they add certs for testing.

When you're playing you can really tell SOE is putting a lot of eggs into this basket. Smed is online practically every night sending out messages, assuring us the bugs/balance issues players mention on the forums are being addressed. And the devs are playing too.

Since it's a tech test, I can't go away without mentioning that the game has been surprisingly stable with hundreds of players on screen. This is on high settings too. The potential for huge open scale battles is here. In fact I've already been part of a few. It's quite a scene to be running over a hill with a squad only to see a battlefield in a valley with tanks on both sides blowing everything to hell.

If they stay true to what's been promised so far, they should have one hell of a game come release. I was hugely addicted to Battlefield 2, and right now without the certs/outfits its a much nicer looking/larger scale version of that. Keep an eye out for this one if you like FPS's.

It's a waste of time to talk to this guy.

I can't trust Smed anymore. Not after the selling the EU's down the river fiasco. I mean, it mayvery well be a very good game.. but how long will it remain so in SoE's hands? I loved classic EQ. I loved classic SWG. I loved classic EQ2.. I don't even need to mention what happened to these games contrary to everything he said. Then he came out after SWG and said that they learned their lesson after the SWG debacle.. and then they proceeded to carry on doing the exact same things.

the guru has spoken

After seeing what they did with Vanguard It is going to be hard pressed to get me to sub to any SoE game in the future. Such a great game, so much potential, and to let it basically roll over and die was an utter disgust to me. They sit by for years and did nothing. I don't want dev teams and companies like that running the games I pay for thats for sure.