Played since early 2012, with 1000+ hours put into this game, was too lazy to launch on Steam and used the client instead most of the time. Eventhough I enjoyed this game for its unique mechanics, character designs/aesthetics, and community, there has much that has gone wrong in this game (Although I still comeback for major updates for a short while of time to see if they tried to put effort into fixing this game).

Pros:

- The amazing variety of customization that you can do; albeit the girls has more interesting selections than the guys.

- Eventhough it is a P2W game, if you manage doing marketing well, spending time to invest buying low and selling high, striking good deals with other players, lots of grinding, doing surveys for KC, and taking advantage of events that give free stuff, it is possible to play for free with good gear, but takes a lot of time and effort.

- Memorable OSTS, although I put the music volume at 0 because its very distracting when you play pvp and need to listen to the enemy closely.

Cons:

- PvP: I myself am a PvP main on Elsword, so why would I put this here? In my opinion, PvP was fantastic throughout Season 1 and Season 2. You were placed in the right skill level so that matches would always be mentally challenging by constantly having to read your opponents moves, well-paced with most matches taking 2-4 minutes, and a good learning experience to improve by learning from your mistakes. However now, match ranking has been unbalanced, sometimes placing me against low level new players which is unfair, dying quickly due to +11-+13 geared players who usually use the run and attack tactic or spam one combo/skill to win (I will never understand how people find fun in doing that), and unbalanced skills which make some characters op and others with a disadvantage proves to be frustrating indeed. The lag is also very unbearable, which I blame from the merging of Latin American server with the North American server, as well as when Elsword was introduced to Steam (Eventhough ironically, I was hyped that Elsword was going to be on Steam when it was announced). Most of the time nowadays, I spend playing in sparring, rather than arena because of the less toxicity and more chilled atmosphere.

- Community: Depends on how you play the game. For me, I enjoyed the community of Elsword because I was able to find a guild that was outgoing and made friends who I still occasionally talk to today and recieve compliments in sparring matches (NOT Arena) because of my playstyle. However the community is not always pretty, especially when you get into PvP Arena. In the more recent years, I have yet to experience a day in PvP without being called a noob, cheater/hacker, and verbally harrassed, (Though I never cared about it because I learned to ignore these types of things) which is pretty disappointing. Although I never experienced being scammed before, there have always been a lot of scammers on Elsword because the game is highly dependant on trading with other players.

- P2P: I've spent a well 100-200$ on this game, mostly on cosmetics, but never in enhancing items. Nowadays soloing newer dungeons or to do well in PvP, you need at least +10-+13 in order to survive. It sucks when you put much time and effort in this game, but is limited because you don't have strong enough gear unless you pay. I grinded my way through events and dungeons to get +9 on all of my gear, but it is still barely good enough for the higher end PvE and PvP. Getting +10 or higher through free enhancement events/giveaways requires extremely good luck, or else say goodbye to your wallet.

TL;DR

If you don't want to pay money on this game, good luck spending hours upon hours grinding and waiting for events.
If you do pay money on this game, good luck spending over 100$ trying to get +10-+12 and even more for +13.