Yeah sure. Exclusive tryout for US players with a credit card.
Don't forget that.

Lets not forget these key points as well:

No other game has as bad collision detecting as shadowbane.  Their answer to falling through buildings was to add a event that if you started to go through a roof it would teleport you.  Also, people still use Line of Site bugs to this day.   Been around since launch, and it's a 3 year old game.

No other game is so unbalanced that if you play a priest and you don't got friends it's impossible for you to get anywhere solo.  I mean literally, as a priest you will not get past level 30 solo.  There's other classes that suffer the same problems of being unable to level solo.

No other game has it when you turn down the settings as low as possible (because even on my new system this game STILL LAGS) do the creatures look like bloated colorful marshmellows.

Most other games share the same problem of shadowbane, boring ass pve.  Except only in shadowbane can you hunt the pve from the safety of being inside a boulder, or underneath the floor.

No other game can you fly up in the air with the majority of the classes.  No other game can you see through the roof of houses and pick people off by doing so.

No other game do you spend lots of time building cities, and none of them have the cool siege system of shadowbane where people in china or korea who are like 12 hours difference or whatever can set bane times on your city to like 4am in the morning.  No other game can you lose months of work at 4 am in the morning because you have a life and can't afford to sacrifice it for a game.

No other game  has had years of dupe bug problems, and no other game has had such a massive amount of money duped to the point where they had to put CAPS on how much money you could put in anything.

No other game has a website that after 3 years from launch hasn't updated majority of the sections to reflect the 2 expansions additions, and about 20 patchs that have come out since then.  In fact, expect to not be able to go to their website for much of any information and just go to other fan based sites for information.

Not many other games can you get ganked  by agroup or solo pks who are just so high level than you starting out that you can't do anything about it.  They actually farm you, because you might find items they want.

As hardcore as shadowbane sounds, 90% of the stuff this guy says is totally blown out of proportion.  Their city design system is neat, and the fact that you can manage vendors/build great alliances is awesome as well.  Too bad there's not enough people playing the game to get any real wars going, majority of city spots are taken by members of some of the larger guilds who have been around for awhile to collect a fortune.

WIth that in mind, take what ashen says with a grain of salt.  Of course  he's not going to say his game sucks ass, and which certain aspects do not suck ass... like the city biulding if you actually get a spot and a group of people to help out with it.  The pvp is superb at max level...  a lot of classes are just way better than others though, so expect to get your butt kicked a lot if you're a spear priest, or anything else that the game just didn't balance out. 

Shadowbane sets up a game that is all about being ruthless as they claim.  The thing is, without good mechanics and just pure ruthlessness mechanics you end up with some extremely bad experiences.  Players have been known to camp tree's for hours, hunt lowbies making it sometimes impossible to level solo and generally able to ruin any experience you may have and make you hate the game if you don't make friends easily.  Luckly, the game is a very open game so you do have the exact opposite of the ruthless type (they're just really rare), but expect politics to really be out the window... however, they do have a role play server coming out soon, which might make for some interesting politics.

This is all from my experiences, which i played Shadowbane for 2 years.

If they improved the siege system and basically improved their entire engine they might have something in the long run.  It's just, shadowbane is dead population wise and the bugs I don't see going anywhere anytime soon.