They've added several new servers and kept people from creating new characters on the original servers for several days to even out the populations.
I tried to get in the first couple days as a f2p player, but only waited in the queue for 4-6 hours before going to bed. Then they opened two new servers and I got on the Ezi server as Elowa. I've been enjoying it a lot, although I love to explore, gather, farm, and craft. The graphics are pretty good, too.
They've done quite a few changes the last week to try to lower the queue wait times. (aggressively booting AFKers/spammers, adding more servers, etc.) If you were having huge wait times before, it should be much better now.
Some positives in my opinion:
- Amazing character customization for faces. There are hundreds of sliders you can change.
- Sandbox. It has quests and an main story quest, but you can literally just run around and do whatever.
- Crafted items are best items.
- No real loot other than coins and rare crafting materials. Some quests will give gear as you go through them.
- Flexibility in class. Like Dorian mentioned, there are 120 options for classes (you pick 3 out of 10) and have points to spend on the skills to make unique builds. Can also change them around when you want.
- Gliders that you can fly/float on.
- Custom player-owned housing.
- Lots of outfits, which a mechanism to modify clothing/armor to look like other pieces.
The downsides (again my opinion):
- Can't customize body features (everyone of each race is same build and height). It amazes me that this is not changeable with how customizable the faces are.
- Strong focus on PvP (I'm not an MMO PvP fan) with conflict areas, encouraged scamming (within game mechanics), and an overall "pirate" environment.
- The above environment seems to have attracted players that love to grief or otherwise abuse other players. For example, people are constantly destroying other people's publicly planted crops before they mature (so no resources are given), just to keep someone else from getting the resources. These people are even using their labor points to do this.
- Their pay/store mechanism could be considered "pay to win" on some level. Land (housing and private farms) can only be owned by paying customers. Monthly subscribers get labor points when offline and twice as many while logged in as f2p. (LP are used for all crafting/farming/harvesting.) Some items are only sold on the marketplace (no way to get it in game other than buy from someone who paid real money for it).
