MMO reviews guilty of the ol' bait and switch?

The indomitable Cameron Sorden over at Random Battle pondered the ramifications of a phenomenon earlier this week that has had a lot of bloggers of the MMO persuasion scratching their heads. Namely, what's to be done about the glaring discrepancy between optimistic preview write-ups for new MMOs and the inevitable critical panning post-release? Cameron argues that it's the consumer that ultimately gets screwed over by this system, as he faithfully follows the coverage of bloggers who insist that games in their beta state show considerable promise, or at least show enough potential to warrant over-looking a few minor quibbles that could be settled before launch. Shouldn't critics get tougher on games pre-release?

Of course, if the issue were that simple, there'd be no need to blog about it. The counter-example is a game like Tabula Rasa, which received an utter panning by people who were able to play it in its pre-release state. Now that it's been out for a few months, the community is starting to realize that there's actually a really fun game there that only really congealed in the month prior to release. The game hasn't been able to escape those early impressions however, and though we really have no raw data on how well it's doing, it'd be hard to call it an unmitigated success. Make sure to check out Cameron's take on it, graph and all. It's interesting to think about.