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I will also give my experience. I was in beta for 3 months and played the following types of characters:

Dwarf:
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Pure Warrior
Warrior Blacksmith
Pure Blacksmith

Elf
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Pure Scout
Scout and Outfitter
Scout and Scholar

Dragon
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Warrior and Blacksmith

Of course, I had to restart a lot of these character multiple times due to wipes.

The character is broken down into adventure and craft. You can advance in either one without having to advance in the other. In other words, you can join a craft school and become a master weaponsmith without ever killing a single thing or even joining an adventure school. This was nice. That said, I will comment on each one.

Crafting
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This is the most advanced system in the game, IMO. It has quite a bit to do, but the interface is a little complex for what you need to accomplish. They could have made it simpler. The steps required to get the materials you need is tedious and you shouldn't need to cut down a few trees to make one bow, for example.
I do like the way the broke it down into gathering, refining, and finished product. I also like the amount of schools you get to choose from and specialize in.

Adventure
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This is pretty boring, right from day one. It is hack and slash where you click a button and watch the creature or yourself die. There are skills that you get with certain levels which can be performed during the combat, but it is really just clicking the buttons. It does have a little strategy in that you need to click the right buttons against certain opponents to get the best of them.

Another stategy they implemented is a ROCK PAPER SCISSORS way to fight, which are stances you get at certain levels. What they do is randomize what stance the opponent is in and you can see that by what color circle they have on the ground where they stand. You can pick a stance to defend against that stance and allow you to hit them with more power. Red beat green, green beat blue, and blue beat red. So, you had to change colors during combat to make sure you got the best hits and the opponent didn't get the best of you. It was ok, and at least allowed you to do more during combat.

Selling and buying
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I like what they did with this, in that they have consigners you can give your goods to for selling. They take a percentage of the selling price. You can also set up your own place, or even just a bag, to allow other to look at and buy goods without having to pay a consigner, but this has a drawback of you having to stand there all day so people can browse your goods. This prevents you from going and making other goods, so you have to make a choice if you go this route.

The other nice thing is you can only sell a certain amount of things at each consigner so you do not get a flood of the same thing by one person. This keeps the goods more varied.


World
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The first thing I want to mention is the teleporting. This is terrible even though you have to pay for it. The problem is that you can get around the cost. They have starting areas in the game and then the main cities. Well, to teleport from a starting city to a main city is free. Teleporting from main cities to anywhere else cost you except to Tazoon, which the the hub city. Well, if you bind yourself to a shrine in a starting city, you can teleport to any city for free. If you need to go to another city, you can recall for free back to your starting city and then teleport to the next city you want to go to. Bad design if you are going to allow teleporting.

What this does is destroy the consigner concept since it is so easy to teleport to all the cities. The reason is the banks are global so no matter where you go, you can get all your goods. You can then easily put on goods for sale in all the cities and return to making more.

The world itself is fairly large. I actually like the runs looking for new things I haven't seen. There are many places that no one has gone too, which just tells me that teleporting was a bad idea since most people are just teleporting around instead of running around to the other cities.

Dynamic content
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They do have the background of the Withered Aegis. This is fairly dynamic in that the creatures can attack a city, or slowly bring their encampments closer to a city. You have to beat them back, which is fun. They can destroy buildings and walls, which you can repair and make useful again. This is the best part of the game though it can get quite slow die to lag when many people are around.


Lag
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They improved on this quite a bit, but there is still something wrong here. You can be fighting a creature, and suddenly you are doing nothing for 20-30 seconds. All of a sudden you hit 5 or 6 times really quickly. This tells me that the queue is not being processed correctly. The bad thing is that while you are standing there, the creature you are fighting sometimes is still fighting. In some cases you die to creatures you never lost to before.

The other thing lag affects is seeing the characters around you, both PC and NPC. At times, it can take 20-30 seconds for an NPC, that you know is there, to show up show you can click on them to perform an action. I have never seen lag like this in any other game.

Bug reporting
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I like the report system they had. You go online and choose the area which concerns you problem. You report the problem and upload any logs and pictures you have and you get a tracking number. They respond when they read it and ask for more information if necessary, and you get and email when the problem gets closed. The problem is that it needs refinement. If they update the problem asking for more information, you never know that unless you go online to look at your problems. Also, when you report the problem and they send it to development, it gets closed. You never know if the problem gets fixed. They should keep it open until development fixes the problem. I had many problems that were never fixed but the problem closed.

There is a lot more I could say, but I will leave it at this for now. Everyone can chomp on this information for a while.

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