I'll try not to go in too much into details about the. Instead I'll cover my experience in the game. In short, while playing the game, I found myself constantly wasting time on trivial things (like inventory management) to the point where I spend between 20-50% "play-time" just preparing for or cleaning up after playing.
Pay to play... Just to get this out of the way. The game is free, but due to low player base you will not be able to play solo for free. You'll probably have pay for hero system (look it up) or waste a lot of time looking for groups.
For those of you who want the longer story:
I've played the game for about a year, took a year break and played for about a month more and I have to say I like it and hate it at the same time.
Gameplay is amazing! I could play it for hours....if I could play it that is....
Few good things:
- The playerbase is small, which is mostly a bad thing, BUT the problems low numbers create makes the community amazing (or maybe my guilds were amazing).
- Again, low number of players makes resources scarce and economy "fun". There's no set price on a given item. Certain crafted items are worth a small fortune, purely because there aren't that many people who both gather and craft (or just bother doing it for money)
- Gameplay unique in many ways (which is a huge selling point for this game).
Now on with the actual problems...To put it bluntly, you will have to waste hours upon hours of time on trivial account maintance and prep-work and A LOT MORE hours leveling and grinding for equipment (by the way, that grinding also increases "account maintenance" time).
A few examples:
- The game features pets and mounts that give you bonuses. They lose health if you don't feed them (0 health pet gives no bonuses). That might seem like a minor detail, but there you go - you have to feed ALL of your pets across ALL characters or have items to heal them when they "die". That's about 5-10min per 1-3 days just to feed + about 20min / month for each pet to get the "food"(that builds up if you have multiple pets like most people do).
- Small playerbase means you can spend HOURS looking for a group and still not find it.
- Hero system (a premium feature that allows you to control multiple characters) can be used to play alone with 6 character, but after battle you get A LOT of trash items spread across all 6 characters (most of time identical items). You can't really fight different types of monsters without having to clean up your inventory.... ALL THE TIME.
- If you want to say....find a particular piece of equipment, monster, resource or just figure out what the hell that dialogue is talking about - good luck! While you read the official encyclopedia to check which monster drops a certain item and such (if it is dropped), you will most likely not find your answer there due to lack of referencing and descriptions....and you'll never find certain monsters without knowing where to look....
- Clunky feel of the game: There are loads of input issues in the game (appart from input suddenly not doing anything).
- For instance if you're fighting a large monster, it's close to impossible to walk onto or target the cell behind it (which you sometimes have to do to hit it). Most of time in such cases you to waste so much time on walking you don't have the time to attack.
- Another example would be phantom actions. You start to chop a tree, you wait until action finishes and nothing happens. Is it a lag? is it a glitch? Did you do something to cancel it at last second? Yes..... now do it again to figure out it wasn't you and restart the client.
- Random class updates might force you to change your build entirely, due to previous playstyle being completely destroyed. Good luck coming up with a new build to match your current equipment or better yet. Good luck getting equipment to match your new build....
I haven't even touched on game-breaking bugs that can literally cost you months worth of time (if you're a hardcore player).
To summarize, I used to love this game, but now that I only had about 2 hours a day to play it I didn't even feel it was worth starting it, because of how much time this game waste.