Someone asked me today, would I recommend this game - comparing it to "a movie costing 40 bucks vs. the amount of time you got out of Pantheon" and honestly I didn't have an answer.

I spent a lot of my time getting several characters over 30, which means after 25 it's killing the same few things - over and over and over to watch very minimal gains in XP. XP being slow is understandable when content is VERY limited, so the game 'peaks' and has most activity around level 20, which is sad, because you can get there very quickly. And worse, VERY linearly. I also spent a ton of time trading up, sitting around AFK in town (when it was popular and there were a lot of players).

Now, I purchased this game for the future and to put a little $$$ towards Brad's vision, with VERY LOW hopes. I would not pay for this game in it's current iteration without that preface.

Listen, we are on year 10. You can do all kinds of backflips and mental gymnastics to justify the current state of the game after 10 years (low budget, graphics re-work at some point, yada yada) but this is a plain and simple fact. We are in year 10 and we don't even have basic proper functioning stats such as STR / STA / CON / DEX / ETC - foundational things that should have been hard-coded on year 0. STR does not function as it should, after 10 years, and now they are talking about a complete 're-work' where all classes will require 4-5 primary stats, and CON replacing DEX. Look, if we can't get 1 stat working properly after 10 years, let's tone down 'another re-work'. No more 're-works', this shouldn't be a sketchpad after 10 years guys. Get it sorted.

Besides that, you have a VERY linear progression path to mid 20s. You are playing most of your time in a single dungeon that has existed in this game for YEARS pre-EA. With a combination of orcs they seemed to just have spray painted all over a zone in AVP with terrible itemization, no chests, no boss, just respawns over and over. This is 'peak' content, this is where the bottleneck of players are. Fighting these braindead orcs for no rewards.

Many basic foundational things just aren't working, are bugged, or not in game yet: mitigation, resistances, stats, AC, dodge/parry, some spells, some abilities, perception system, mastery system, barebones classes, hell, Enchanters don't even have charm yet. Like really barebones 'should have been locked in at year 0' kinda stuff. It baffles me.

The singular worst thing about this game is this community spirit, devs begging for feedback on discord, saying they want to make changes based on player feedback (by gamers, for gamers kinda thing) yet player feedback is 100% ignored. In all this time, there isn't even a single dev-post in the Monk section of their discord, let alone many other classes. Really cool ideas and feedback from players, largely ignored. Instead, what DOES go in-game is so surprising, you'll think to yourself, is this feedback or are we just throwing stuff at the wall to see if it sticks? Try to give a smidgen of criticism on discord and you will be ATTACKED by these die-hards who take everything personally, while the moderation on that platform is TERRIBLE at best.

Nobody asked for gathering nodes to have big bright sparkles splattered over them due to their visibility. Nobody asked for a 1-button-press debuff system, in a game that is already SO trivial in terms of difficulty. Nobody asked for them to trivialise the difficulty in their most popular dungeon (which was already an easy slog). Nobody asked for con changes (we know why they did though, so people don't burn through content too fast). All we have been asking for is CONTENT. There is nothing, each patch I feel second hand embarrassment for these guys. Every patch is followed by an emergency announcement post ''we are aware of the game breaking issue'', dupes, bugs, game breaking bugs, horrible in-game changes, the feedback is mostly negative, but nobody listens.

This last patch though, man what a doozy. It really messed with the flow of the game, some classes more than others. Feedback was CRAZY, they had make another announcement post basically saying "yes it's broken, sorry, we gotta break a few eggs to make a cake"... Nah, you revert the patch, or you fix it within 24h. We are going on day 3 since this game-breaking patch, many people leaving, 20% player loss in the last week alone, and they have no sense of urgency. You can see the design guy humming and hawing about changing the graphics to crafting tables (lol), the creative guy going on rants once a month like he's sketching stuff out on a whiteboard, and the rest of the team is MIA.

So, I'm leaving a bad review. I haven't played for weeks. I'll change it in 6 months to a year if there is even the slight hint that you, as a customer, can have any faith in these guys - but my only concern now is that with the dwindling population and no new sales, it is likely the game will be shutdown by then.

Well boys, we had a promising gem on our hands.

Unfortunately, the absolute low-IQ developers have tainted and taken a big steaming dump all over this mediocrity and pretty much botched it. Maybe it'll rise out of the stinky bar toilet and clean itself up.

But me? I'm just gonna flush this dirty turd down the hatch, and forget I ever took this steaming crap.

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A last minute EA cash grab. Do not support this scam - let it die as a lesson to other devs who defile the hopes of the mmorpg community and treat their audience like gullible children.