LotD is closing in on a full Tier 3 city, and we've held a battle keep since the first day they became available. I have a level 80 Tempest of Set, and a level 60 Necromancer at the present time. Overall I think AOC is a decent game, but I do think its going to take a big subscriber retention hit if it doesn't get some things fixed by the end of the 3 month mark.
Character AdvancementAOC has good character advancement up through about level 55. From there the rate of advancement slows considerably because there is no bridge from the level 55 to level 60 content. The next exp bottle neck happens at levels 70-80 as everyone is packed into a single instance of Keshetta. In Keshetta there are only 3 spawn locations that provide a decent rate of exp for character advancement, and that is
with a PL grind group. Without a PL grind group I'd probably hang myself.
Solo content is especially weak after level 55, and PL grinding from level 20 to level 80 is five (5) times faster and more rewarding than leveling via the quest system. They need to beef up the questing xp, rewards, and make the quests more efficient.
The game needs a lot of good solo instances that are good for leveling, loot, offer limited interference from random exp PK's. As I predicted to others, bored level 80's rolling exp groups for fun makes the server populations go down.
Class BalanceWhat can I say because Funcom never did much testing above level 20. Most classes still have top tier talents that don't work or don't work right. Also Funcom expects players to keep shelling out for respecs due to their class balancing, and some players report respec costs of up to 8 friggin gold right now.
I expect several more months of Funcom trying to buy a clue as far as class balance goes.
Guild Cities It takes a huge amount of work to build a guild city above the Tier 1 level. This is where I see small guilds pretty much pushed out of the game because they won't be able to craft high level stuff without access to the top end crafting buildings.
Border Kingdoms and Battle KeepsSmall guilds will never own a battle keep. Funcom stated that Towers would be added in to the border kingdom areas, but so far they are not in there. So at this point there is no role for a small guild in end game PVP.
On the higher end of PVP, AOC performance in large battles is spotty. Each patch either moves game performance forward a notch, or sets it back two notches. Right now the game croaks if you try anything higher than 48vs48, and croaks a lot of the time even trying to support regular 48vs48. They have got to fix this soon, or seriously adjust their expectations for end game PVP.
Arena PVP is a joke, has no meaning, no rewards, and no ladders.
Resources/ CraftingResource gathering is the most boring thing on the planet. Having to do quests and farm rare resources to go from T1 to T3 resource gathering ability is even more ridiculous. I think Shadowbane had a good idea when they created resource mines that would auto gather, and then give players a small objective to fight over. Too bad AOC didn't take a page from the SB book when they put in their resource system.
Guild ManagementThis is TERRIBAD, and needs improvement asap. We're stuck with preset guild titles that make no sense (chillotyses, etc), people quit the guild by accident all the time while trying to close the MOTD interface, there's no guild tools to set a tax, etc.
Honestly I would have expected a next generation guild management interface from this game, but it simply hasn't delivered that. Instead I feel like I've been warped back to 1999.
VerdictAOC has a lot to do and little time to do it. Warhammer might be called a WoW clone by some, but its still more PVP oriented than WoW. Therefore if its relatively bug free and mostly feature complete (as advertised) at launch it could siphon off a lot of people from WoW as well as people who are fed up with AOC by that point.
The game has a lot of promise, but I think its too soon for the Community Manager to be calling AOC "steak" and WoW "McDonalds".