Let's talk about some things.

First, let's talk about the developers behavior. Oh boy, have they been upsetting nearly everyone. I'd honestly say they are worse than the community here itself, which is really saying something. Let's go over their record.

They have a really great habit of ignoring those asking for help, and banning anyone who has anything negative to say about the game.
They won't expand the servers so people from around the world can play, effectively choking their profits and playerbase.
Literally hiring moderators with brainrot, who ban people left and right, for having differing OPINIONS than them.
Refuses to make the game more "new player friendly" like EVERY OTHER MMO HAS, even the garbage mobile app games that are turning 4 or 5 years old.
Spouts "sucks to be you" rhetoric to anyone who has something to say about in game scamming.
Incorporated Easy-Anti-Cheat. Which is highly intrusive, easy to bypass, and generally hated.
Included an insane cosmetic shop, 100$ for skins? What?

The mindset here is GAINS and CONTROL. The premium service is standard in MMOs so there really is no reason to whine about any of that, but now we can move onto what is WRONG with this game.

So pretty much every negative review you will read is "once you get to higher tier gear farms, game becomes a grind chore, and you often find yourself losing everything constantly to big groups that are ALWAYS there." Yep, they aren't wrong. REACHING endgame so you can ACTUALLY play with others is nearly impossible. I'd say 95% of players quit once PVP becomes required to continue. Most people will respond at this point with "well just find a group" oh yes! let's get into that my friends. Let's talk about grouping.

So 5-8 players isn't enough. I'm dead serious. You will quite often run into 15-20 man zergs that will just CC you to death, there's no avoiding it. I'm sorry to say this really is the biggest issue. I love games like RUST and I love high risk, high reward gameplay, this isn't it though. In those games the risk being so high to a solo player is that yes, it is still possible for that ONE player to get his raid off on some big clan, survive, and make off with the loot. Here? MAYBE you can handle 3 other players, MAYBE if they are near your gear levels. If they are kitted fully you're done, enjoy losing your stuff. That's not even the case. Most gank squads run 8+ players so the only thing you can do is run and hope they don't have another group ahead of you, or another separate group ambushes you while you're fleeing. Now we get into the responses of "get into one of the big guilds"

Impossible. You already need to be a pro to get into the...5 comp guilds that run things for the most part? 3 if you're REALLY being serious about territory and alliances. Joining a smaller guild often leads to you just running solo or in 2 or 3 man groups anyways. The big guilds run on schedules, work around eachother, try to plan for best ganks / wars. You're just going to get in the way, swallowed up, and the guild you're in will probably disband anyways after a couple months. Got lucky and managed to get into a bigger guild with more active players? Yeah you'll probably grind for a month, they will take your loot and boot you for a better combat focused player. That or they will outright lead you into the PVP zones, boot you, then take your stuff. So there's really no good answer here either.


So that pretty much covers the game, let's talk about how they could fix it since MAYBE, someone working there MIGHT read this and take this to heart, doubtful, but here we are.

Easy fixes : Make it so that there's a ratio that grouped players can't attack numbers wise. Say 1 solo player cannot be attacked by 4+ grouped players. That allows for a more balanced combat zone, where you'll see big gank battles, and smaller skirmishes around the zone. It also allows those solo players a higher chance to escape. The gank chance is still there, it's just not overwhelming and causing players to leave the game left and right. It would make the game FUN again. Big groups still get their big battles, picking off a few even if they run, small groups still get to engage in the content. EVERYONE WINS.

The only other recommendation i could make is limit guild member cap to an agreed upon number, and disallow alt guilds. This would probably upset a lot of the "heavy alt players" but I think it would build a more healthy territory environment. With way more skirmishes and territory shifts. Instead of what we have right now, which is really just 2 big guilds owning most of the map, and a third owning a section. The #1 guild even stopped recruiting because there isn't enough competition in the game! It's too easy for them to hold majority territory. None of us EVER wanted to see this game turn into 3 big exclusive kingdoms running everything. We wanted CONSTANT warring. You can still have all the crazy politics and betrayals on a smaller scale, nothing would really change except the game would become more war focused. Either that, or make a dedicated alliance system so nearly everyone falls under some kind of flag. You could even just make it so the main BIG guild has alliances and all the allied guilds come together during times of war, and they defend their own territories that they have won, or have been awarded to them by the lead guild.

In closing, if the devs weren't so close minded, more open to criticism, i don't think we would be in this spot right now. Instead, since the playerbase is dying off fairly quickly, they've resorted to typical cash grab schemes that we mostly see on mobile apps.

Best avoided.

EDIT: This review DOES NOT come from a place of hatred. Everything is here for a truly enjoyable PVP experience, it just needs some minor tweaking mechanic wise. We could see that HUGE playerbase that we had back in the day, if only the devs would listen. Either way, even though they've been downright inappropriate in their behaviors, I wish them the best, and I hope the game eventually recovers to its glory days.