After 18 hours of beta playtime here are some more notes.

Starting out on a brand new toon you have a "tool bag" that has one of each tool type. You also get a portal shard so that you can port to an outlying area if you choose to. (This is only on brand new toons right out of the tutorial.)

Stats are gained and saved although inventories are not. (a ding sound and a message in the top left of your screen informs you of a stat/skill gain. You can also keep tabs on your paper doll and record your progress.)

I put a total of 18 hours into the beta so far playing each role and using each skill. Range is hard to play on the high ping but you can do it. (staff to 32, archery to 21, great axe to 26) I went to the southern bindstone of ice island after sitting in the northern most elfland starter city and farmed the bandit camp.

I even had a guy on a mount try to PK me so I jumped in the water until he decided to quit chasing me. (mounts still swim for free)

@Mor: The reason gold was easy for us to make is because we blatantly exploited the shit out of the andruk dungeon. Money gain is fairly slow at the game start farming wise. The only real option to make mass amounts of cash at startup is to...

A: Find an exploitable high end spawn(where I was I was already perching Ice Jarls but could not finish the kills by myself as the health regen was too fast for my noobie mana missile. although i did raise my staff skill a shit ton lol)

B: Harvest mass resources and sell to the city builders or stock pile mount materials (just remember that those that are building cities are already going to be strapped for cash) I would right at launch to get mountcrafting ASAP and run around wildnerness areas killing the ORE MINERS that will be trying to get the very first server up rare ore types to get a jump on the economy.

I can tell you already that 4 guys over the course of 3 hours of play killed the new swamp dragon on the southeast side of the map middle and that I am dissapointed that AV still has not done much in the way of blocking exploits after 2 years.

Also there have already been mass gank squads and lots of small scale PvP as well as 2 guild dueling tournaments and one inter guild 5v5 tourny already done. The winning 5v5 team consisted of...you guessed it...5 mage roles all spamming the PBAE lightning ability since the PBAE has a larger area than a melee attack.

I still love sandbox mmo concept but my gripe still lies in aventurine being mis-managed. They already trolled us into making their xmas money but hell, 15 bucks for a slot machine pull that may pay off later down the road is not that bad of a deal i guess lol.

Like I said though I will pick it up again at a later beta build or at launch as I no longer believe in beta grinds.

Here's to hoping they get the kinks worked out.

Last edited by Donkleaps; 12/20/12 03:00 PM.
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