I played this game in a number of the beta's, and now have 70 hours post release.

TL;DR at the bottom, just scroll down if you want.

I have observed the community, market, and Politics on several servers, though I have not reached max level on any of them. This will likely hinder my review in some respects as from what I have heard from others, a lot of the problems with the game are found post Max level.

But, for the sub 40 Crowd, the problems are still numerous, and still game breaking.

Let's start with Crafting, which is honestly in a very poor if conflicted state, area's of crafting are very well done and everything ties together between refining and crafting to create a nominally pleasing crafting experience. Except for resources that just arn't in the game, or drop at a rate to make them nearly mythical without the same rarity tag to confirm it. Blue item's in certain crafting tier's drop less than Purple or orange items in other tiers.
Actually crafting an item can be meaningless, as even if you get all the materials and even spring for materials a Tier above to get better Gear Score, the values are completely random and only moderately controllable. Their are crafting items in game that can be applied during the crafting process to determine stats or ability buffs but not both. That means you can make a set of armor that you used a material to give it a buff to a two handed axe ability, but when crafted the stats you get are Focus (a completely useless stat for the weapon and buff).
This means you would have to have potentially dozens of that specific crafting material and much more of the base materials just to get what you want, and the Bonus materials are not common drops in some cases being practically legendary in their drop rates.
All of that effort, and if you wanted to sell what you just spent hours grinding out? well that ties into the next point.

The Market is ♥♥♥♥♥♥.
Materials sell for fractions of what they would be worth if everyone and their mother wasn't constantly undercutting everyone. The entire world in game is seperated into individual markets, which would make sense if the servers were full enough to make that reasonable. The servers are capped at 2k people though, and as the average level increases, certain towns become almost abandoned. That still doesn't help enough in focusing enough people to have a single stable market though.
I've seen Tier 4 (level 40+) Gathering tools being sold for less than Tier 1 tools, due to ridiculous undercutting. Base level resources which are needed to refine higher level resources are somehow still valued at 0.07 gold each. Which is a pitiful amount for someone selling, but that still means that on average a single T4 Item costs at least 400 gold to produce. That's right, 400 gold to produce, but only selling for 25 gold.
There are no vendor's, there are no base prices, everything has to be sold to get gold, and you need gold for everything.
The market is ofcourse further destabilized by Companies that own towns and absolutely gouge on taxes.
You heard that right folks, TAXES. There's a housing tax, a market tax, a refining tax, and a crafting tax.
Each of these taxes are adjustable by the Governing Company. Which means if your Governor is kind and understanding the taxes might be low or average, but the norm is High or extreme.
The taxes are sort of an issue though, that stems into the Factional/Company warfare and Territory control aspect of the game.

Territory control is ♥♥♥♥♥♥.
Just bought a territory after raising the 100k gold necessary to do it? Get ready to lose it or be seiged every single second of every single day until you just no longer want to bother with the whole thing anymore.
Territories can be thrown into conflict by other factions via doing the PvP missions their faction guide gives out in said territory.
These missions can be zerged almost effortlessly. get 50 people in a blob, and just circle jerk the entire repeating process for an hour or two and you have thrown the territory into conflict and can declare war (lol).
The only counter to this is to circle blob with your own faction or try to crush the opposing blob, which will just wait until more of your members are asleep or otherwise busy and then repeat.
This is made more difficult by the fact that the longer a town is held by any 1 faction the easier it is to flip.
This is made even more difficult by the amount of exploits and bugs in the game, including several variants of invulnerability exploits and rubber band exploits.
Once you do get war declared on you, get ready for grief. The most popular methods to taking territory on larger servers is to either mass report enemy leadership and get them banned (since the process is automated and as easily weaponized as a twitter mob), or to utilize invulnerability and rubber band exploits to win. Oh or just cause massive server lag to the point where people are just standing there.
These methods are used on offence and defence.
If you lose, or win, the upgradeable defences and crafting stations in town are reduced by a level by random. This means you have to pay to have them upgraded again. These upgrades go from 100 gold, to thousands of gold. Meaning you either need to be farming that gold constantly as a Company, or utilizing the Tax system to get it from the population. Raise it to much though and your town population might decrease, causing a funding issue as well as looking like an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and having less people willing to defend your territory thus causing a cyclical decline.

PvE is pretty fun though, I've honestly enjoyed most of the time ive spent just running around on my own or with a few friends doing some of the PvE content. Though Dungeons and Expeditions require a timelocked and Bind on Pick-up craftable that is honestly pretty poorly done. There are aspects to the crafting that are bugged and or broken as well.

Generally this game should have been in development for probably another year. I am going to lay the blame on the higher level decision makers at Amazon & Amazon Game studios. I've heard that their guys in charge have 0 experience with game development or even gaming in general. The early phases of this game were all over the place and a lot of what's left are reminiscent of all the trends they tried to chase while producing New World.
This is Amazon Game Studio's 6th project I believe, and they really needed this one to work on account of their previous 5 projects all being absolute failures. This has only been as successful as it seems due to people being absolutely desperate for a new GOOD MMORPG. As most of the new MMO's follow the same cycle of release buggy or underdeveloped, and then die. Or Release from Korea/China/Japan with poor localization and heavy P2W MTX with Whale Hunting on the mind.

this is the end of my review for now, my fingers hurt.

TL;DR Games bad man, 3/10.



Edit: As of 2022-12-14, during the Winter event.

I reinstalled the game to see how far it had come. He is a short exerpt of my findings.
Reported 12 bots in 1 day, without really looking for them. Saw numerous world and other chat about how prevalent bots are.
roughly a dozen graphical clipping or stuttering issues.
World chat reports of falling through the world on at least 2 occasions in a roughly 10 hour period of intermittent playing and doing other tasks.
The market is still largely ♥♥♥♥♥♥ due to Bots and people still being people.

My recommendation is to buy this game as steeply discounted as possible if you absolutely have to play it because of friends family or something. Go to ♥♥♥ if you have to. Amazon hasn't earned your money for this game yet.