Recent reviews by mhutch

I really wish I could recommend this. I *wanted *to like it, and spent hundreds of hours playing. But ultimately it's just too frustrating.

Pros:
* The environments are beautiful and the audio is top notch
* Gathering is really satisfying
* Combat has a nice weight to it
* Decorating your house is fun

Cons:
* It's really, really buggy. Patches fix bugs, but introduce new ones. For example: wars (or any kind of group content) have an astounding amount of server lag, crafting randomly fails, some nodes can't be gathered/looted for no apparent reason, the void gauntlet weapon strips expensive food buffs, they deleted an entire set of gear from the game by accident, sometimes faction/town quests can't be turned in, people were winning wars using invulnerability glitches and weapon glitches, they've had to disable the trading post multiple times for days on end despite it being a core part of the game, gold/item duping bugs have wrecked the economy, mobs have gone missing from entire zones for days on end, the servers are down for hours every week (sometimes intentionally, sometimes not), etc
* The server system is awful. You can't play with your friends unless they're on your server. Each server is its own microcosm. Servers have a player cap, and if the server is full, you have to QUEUE.
* The game punishes you for its own bugs. If the server is full and your game crashes. you have to queue. If the game crashes and you're in combat, your gear (and any gear in your inventory) gets damaged and you have to pay a fortune to fix it.
* The crafting/gear system is terrible. It's loot boxes all the way down. 99.99% of gear you craft or is or will soon be worthless. The players who slogged through the horrific grind for levelling crafting and "gear score" first (before they made it HARDER) are getting incredibly rich selling high level items to other players and everyone else gets to find/craft items no-one wants.
* If you're doing all the crafting professions and some PvE and PvE you need about 15 different gear seats yet there's the gear management UI is absolutely awful.
* The trading post is a key part of the game but its UI is also beyond awful and makes everything feel unnecessarily difficult.
* The story is patchwork and uninteresting. There's some great stuff scattered around the world, but it just isn't tied together into an interesting whole.
* PvP - which is the entire reason I played the game - is super unbalanced. There are only a few viable builds, all the best gear comes from horrific PvE grinds and can give a substantial advantage in PvP, bugs and intentional changes wildly unbalance the meta every few weeks.
* Wars don't feel like sieges, they feel like a capture-the-flag slideshow where you can barely tell what's happening.
* Open world PvP is mostly ganking or zerging.
The "Outpost rush" PVP mode has long queues, only matchmade with the small pool of players from your "server", and most matches are incredibly one sided.
* The design of the signature "war" mode practically forces all 100 players onto a single point, yet the skill system is designed around spreading out. This mismatch means it's just a chaotic mess of chain stuns.
* I could go on and on. This is just a *sampling* of the things that frustrate me.

Love this game! Super atmospheric environments and storytelling, and the gameplay is novel and fun.

Easily one of my favourite games ever.