Most MMOs ship when parts are unfinished with the idea that they'll patch the little things later. AOC shipped with core mechanics unfinished and they thought they'd get away with patching those in later.

Item stats didn't work, some abilities didn't do anything and lots of others were horribly broken and untested. Skills had neglibible effects, if any, and a lot of the talents didn't do anything or didn't work as described. Most of the content after tortage was unfinished - there were very few quests in places and of those that did exist almost none had vocal dialogue.

As MeowCat said above, this is the price an MMO pays for launching before it's even close to being finished. You can launch a game late and it'll be fine (e.g. Team Fortress 2, which was at one point considered vaporware) but if you launch a game that's crap, it's going to fail.