This game has tremendous potential to be a very, very engaging game. Its depth of character creation options, skills, abilities, equipment, and massive map give it a tremendous amount of fodder to play with from the respect of storytelling, thematic content, and replay value.
So what kills it? Three things:
1. Absolutely NO use of the larger story. All of your "quests" are given by this "seer" inside a church who tasks you with collecting objects, killing monsters, and killing bosses. And by the way, there isn't any rhyme or reason, and worse, the quests are one-shots, meaning that you will outrun the "content" before you catch up level-wise.
2. The outrageous profiteering angle. In most MMOs, "rest time" is bonus XP you're awarded from being responsible with your time by logging off. In this, "rest time" simply means you make full XP and gold. Once you run out of that, it drops to =one-sixth= of normal. The only way to get rid of this? Pay $54.95 for the "grinder" upgrade, and then keep dropping money on "time cards" that allow you to run with a smaller "out-of-rest-time" penalty. After buying the upgrade? Instead of one-sixth the cash/xp when you run out, it's now =half.= No thanks.
3. Most egregiously - THE GRIND. Dear God, the grind. The amount of grinding in this game manages to match the early days of EverQuest's famous grinds, and that's a very, very bad thing. In order to progress from one level to the next, you must advance four "stats" skills up to move forward. You can only train one at a time, and only in combat. This is fine. What isn't are the 300 other skills that are required to use virtually any equipment at all in the game can't be trained through combat, but only by sacrificing drops gained from killing monsters. There is a "passive advancement" skill that gives you a paltry 3XP per 2 seconds (which is halved for any "non-learning" skill) but it's not really worth it.
It's one thing to warn players that they'll need to slow down and read descriptions, do the math, and think while playing. It's entirely another to =force= the gameplay to such a crawl that you could write the next Great American Novel while waiting for your character to earn enough XP to get their next skill point. Seriously - even MOVING from square to square and looting items after combat has a global cooldown!
This game completely misses the point of F2P. If you want them to pay money, say it outright, don't force them to do it through a thousand cuts of annoyances you've coded into the game that only get better if you pay for it!