I have no particular axe to grind with Planetside 2. While I was hoping it would be everything the developers promised I wasn’t really invested in the idea of Planetside, particularly since I have no experience with the original. It sounds fun, sure, but there’s plenty of other stuff I could be doing with my time, and so it’s no skin off my nose if it turns out to be a flop. In that context it might seem odd to be doing the Angry Internet Man thing of bitching about the latest screwed-up MMO launch if I don’t really have any stake in it. But I think what’s going on with Planetside’s EU launch is interesting. It’s interesting because of the peculiar status of Sony Online’s European operations, and it’s interesting because it’s a perfect storm of bad decisions that are directly contributing to the slapshod and laggy performance of the game on European servers. So if you have a spare ten minutes I’d like you to follow me down the rabbit hole to have a look at possibly the textbook case of How Not To Launch Your MMO (In Europe).