I am a 54-year old father, probably one of the oldest people playing Albion.
I am a single father to my son, who is now 14. My son recently started playing Albion.
In less than a week, he had already played for over 20 hours.
This was terrible for me because it was already hard enough for me to spend time with my son
because he was always out with his friends or watching YouTube. So I decided to make a Steam
account to play with my son. I started playing, but this was my first time playing a video game
since the 90's, so I was quite lost. I asked my son for help, and together we spent some hours playing Albion.
I loved it as it was the best time I had spent with my son since my wife had died. Playing video games
reminded me that there's fun to be had in everything, and it has brought
me and my son closer again, and now we actually spend time together outside the house as well.

I've played the game enough now to get a solid grasp of what it's about, and unfortunately I cannot recommend it.

The community is probably the most toxic I have ever encountered in online gaming, which is saying something. Some of the people I've encountered have an attitude that borders on criminality. The full loot PvP gameplay is not even the worst aspect of this-- the gameplay systems are set up in such a way that Item Power (IP) is the decisive factor in PvP encounters. Leaving aside the possibility of "outplaying" your opponent, a more experienced player with higher Item Power can be more than twice as powerful as a new player in terms of basic statistics like HP, damage, and so on. It is worth bearing in mind that you can purchase equipment with higher Item Power simply by buying gold from the in-game store with real money, converting it to silver, and purchasing it from the market. As bad as this is by itself, the worst thing is the social environment this gameplay loop spontaneously generates.

What this Item Power system equates to is a kind of hierarchy of predation, with one's position on the "food chain" defined by one's commitment and investment either in time, money, or both. I have found this seems to foster an attitude of sadism where "punching down" and exploiting the disproportionate weakness of your opponents is the normal sensible strategy and forms the main content of the game. As a new player, especially a free-to-play player, your role is to be "content" for those who are willing to pay and/or grind.

This might all be more tolerable if only the moment-to-moment gameplay was more interesting, but sad to say the skill ceiling is low, the depth of counterplay and possibility for individual performance to be the decisive factor in encounters is limited on account of the "you-are-what-you-wear" gear system, there is a heavy emphasis on managing cooldowns, and a fairly shallow "MOBA-like" control scheme.

What good can be said is that the economic systems are well-thought out and interesting, which by themselves are entertaining to learn about and play with.

On balance however, even having painfully dragged myself up from the bottom of this pyramid, of course not to the top but somewhere like the bottom-middle, to now have the privilege of myself being able to mercilessly kill the people who were in the position I was a week or two ago, the brutality and mean-spiritedness of the game make it unpleasant to continue. It gives me a kind of moral nausea, as if the worse of a human being I am, the more I am praised by the game's reward systems.

In conclusion, to reiterate, I cannot really recommend the game to anybody.

Scam should be reported under a scam lawsuit buying a mount and losing it forever should violate a lot.