I'm disappointed, but I'm not entirely surprised. Thanks to the legacy of Dungeons and Dragons, we all have a sort-of agreed-upon idea of what fantasy roleplaying gameplay looks like: hack and slash warriors, wizards throwing ranged spells, clerics healing and bashing things, thieves sneaking. We don't have a similarly agreed-upon concept of what science fiction roleplaying gameplay would look like, but we know this: attempts to map those same character classes onto science fiction end up looking really stupid. It's going to take real innovation and brilliant design to put out a science fiction multiplayer roleplaying game with distinct character classes and have millions of people all over the world hear the one or two word description of their character and know, instantly, how they're supposed to play it. Nobody's managed that yet. So I'm not surprised Jagex ended up concluding that their first attempt, even once they got it polished, wasn't fun. But I'm terribly disappointed.

Fortunately, STO, SWTOR, and DUST are hovering on the near-term horizon. We'll see if any of them get it right.