I perfer to think of these are \'milestones\' in our development. It\'s a way of showing people that we are not sitting on our thumbs here and when we say we are really developing a MMORPG we have something that people can actually play.
This is also a good thing for people that want to help develop the game. You often see many posts on different forums about \'I wanna start a MMORPG\'. Well in this case we have and here\'s our proof

It could be an interesting case study to see how the community around the game grows as the game itself moves farther into development.