I really wanted to like this game and did for a while! I enjoyed leveling up to 50 which took me about a week, though I never paid much attention to the main story. MSQs are the standard MMO errand stuff (go kill these many monsters here, go fetch me this, go talk to them) without anything too eye catching for me. One thing that stood out as odd was that there were world events on a leveling log that were needed to complete it. These events were on a timer and would sometimes be contested (PvP) which was my first bad feeling... Still, I soldier on and made my own fun, which was racing to hit the level cap with a friend of mine.

Then I tried fishing... with a ps3 controller... which was frustrating. I know the initial reaction some of you have is "Why play an MMO on a controller, noob?" Well, because the game presented itself as an action based mmo with controller support, so with a claim like that I expect to be able to use a controller and play how I would like to play. Menus required some different buttons to open and close which felt a little random. Targeting and switching between enemies was a bit difficult as well, though as a tank, I powered on and learned to navigate around that headache. But anyway, back to the fishing.

Randomly the game would not register which way I was pulling the joy stick if it wasn't a straight, perfect left or right. If there was a slight angle to the direction, goodbye fish. This was like fishing on hard mode because switching to the keyboard made it 100% easier... which is saying something because fishing in this game is a chore. I wanted to craft a new rod but good luck getting the 30 or so jade from the small sacks, which is a chance drop within a chance drop by the way. I hit fishing level 9 with this and got 1.

The reason I did this is because I wanted to be useful for my guild by crafting power up buffs with food... good luck with that too. Leveling up cooking is infuriating when a recipe calls for other completed recipes with ingredients that are chance drops with a chance great cooking success for a certain number of blues to have A CHANCE at crafting the initial successful recipe... *inhale!* I literally spent an hour killing flame sentries and wizards trying to get curry powder and got exactly 1... the recipe calls for 2... even with a cooking mastery buff I could never craft a blue. Ever.

Needless to say, RNG in this game feels atrocious. Insanely atrocious. For any MMO.

Our guild got curious and opened up a raid to see what that was about... There was no option to close or abandon it and new guild members weren't allowed inside it. We effectively locked ourselves out of doing any raids ever over curiosity over something that was not clearly explained in the game.

Despite all of this, I wanted to like the game, truly I did... then everything changed when the bots attacked.

And the whales.

Bots started appearing everywhere, out of every orifice. It was awful. The Auction house also immediately got flooded with whale players who made the prices on everything skyrocket. As a F2P player, I understand that this game is not geared towards me, but paying real money for an ingame weapon which may then have to be replaced with another piece of weapon or armor... not a good wallet strategy on my end. Not to mention the dungeons...

You can run as many dungeons as you like, though you're limited to the number of times you can loot based on a daily allowance. This irked me at first but I was willing to look past it. Then Halloween came. Despite there not being any real gear available from the event dungeon, I wanted to run it. I wanted to get the things which were only a couple morphs and an amitoi basically... only to find that this was also restricted by the amount of candy corn you have... and you get 1 piece of candy corn, maybe 2 a day. I was upset.

When the reward is an amitoi, something that has no purpose other than picking loot up off the floor and maybe going on a small quest... what's the point? No one else can see your amitoi either so why bother having a butt load of different ones? Why bother ever changing them?

I wanted to like you Throne and Liberty. We could have been amazing together...

But now you're just some MMO that I used to know...