I have been playing this most of the day, and plan on playing it some tomorrow, most likely.
However, I must say, this game represents the absolute worst of MMO game design. I am not sure why people like it.
It should be called: Project Grind
Do you like faction quests? Every NPC in this game is its own faction, most of them will sell very little or not even really talk to you without raising your faction with them. There are several tiers of faction as well.
Then there are the trade skills which are grindy as all hell. So some lady needs flowers for her faction quest. There are flowers all over, but you can’t pick them until you level up your foraging skill. When you finally have enough skill to pick a damn flower, you find out that you do NOT actually pick a flower. Instead you get the flower seeds. You need a decent level of gardening to be able to plant these seeds. Then it gets better, you need fertilizer at some point for these flowers and will the vendor teach you how to do this? Sure, after you do her faction quest.
Then gardening is done is perhaps the worst way possible. Lets say you want a bunch of potatoes (which are useless until you level up cooking and of course you will need faction with the cooking trainer too). Anyway, you can only plant 2 potatoes at once for some unknown reason. Then you need to wait a while, maybe 30 seconds. Then you need to water them with individual water bottles (make sure you are stocked up), and then you need to wait some more. Finally you can pick them. Higher tier plants take longer and have other stages as well.
Seriously, just let me plant like 20 at once, even if they take 2 hours to grow, that’s fine as long as I do not need to stand there during the process. Just let me come back later to collect them.
I decided to play a fire mage, and after doing the fire mage guy’s faction quest (boy did I get lucky, I needed a grape which spawn all over, but I still do not have enough foraging to pick, I found one in a random box somewhere). So now I have fire spells, and to gain new spells, I need to do research. After the basic ones, you need fire dust. I got some with some quests with the fire trainer, but not very much. Anyway, so I am at a tier where I can easily kill basic mobs (pigs and wimpy wolves) but anything harder will waste me. So I spend a long time killing these bastards so I can get to level 10 fire magic. Then I finally do, and buy my next tier of research. Now I need 2x fire powder per spell (there are 6 at this tier), and guess what? I do not have enough fire powder. Who sells this stuff? NOBODY! That’s who.
There are some higher tier undead that can drop it (I asked in chat), but these undead will wipe the floor with me (remember, I have been farming low level critters, way below these undead).
Eventually I find a player-vendor that will sell me some, at a very high price and I get my tier 10 spells. They are a little better then my tier 5 spells. Now guess what I get to do? Grind a bunch of slightly tougher mobs for a good long while so I can get my tier 15 spells (at which point I am told that I can stand a chance on the undead in the ‘newbie’ dungeon).
Its like the game designers took the worse aspects of MMO game design and put them all in one game. I just want to see this newbie dungeon before I uninstall this game. Maybe Ill do that tomorrow, if I have the patience.
