Amen brother.. We played a lot of those games during the development just to see how balanced they were. Basically if you don't pay huge gobs of money you just can't compete. The fighting is totally imbalanced in favor of the people spending a ton of money. Also when we played those games they just didn't feel right.. Like they are just put together to try and make a ton of money. They all seem to lose support after a while, and you end up getting stuck on a server that kind of just dies...
We wanted a game that was a real iOS game designed on a real MMO back end. Sure it cost a fortune, and took us 3 years, but now we have an engine that we can grow in the future and apply it to this game, and any other game we make. We want people to feel like they are playing a game where they are the ruler, and they prove that. We are all looking forward to playing with everyone.
One thing we found in beta is the hard core testers would kick our butts.. We often would find ourselves amazed at how the players would play, and do the things we NEVER expected.. Probably true with every game.
As for missing out on Beta, don't worry about it.. there were a lot of bugs, and changes. I know since we have uploaded to Apple we have found a couple of bugs we missed, but have since been fixed. We are also constantly working on improving and evolving the game with player feedback. We also have tons of things we are looking forward to adding to the game. We have a ton of art that hasn't gone in yet, and then there are other skills, and specialties we are looking at adding. It should be a fun year, and we hope you all enjoy the efforts we are putting in making a game for everyone.
As I have said a ton of times, feel free to suggest things to us. We are always open to discussing changes for the future of the game. After all, the game you will be playing ended up evolving in to what it is with the feedback and input from the players. Things they liked, and didn't like.