I'm not one of the people who will say, "This game blows ass" or, "This game is awesome."  I'm neither a fanboy, nor a hater.  I started playing Conquer Online when I was 11, after my brother's friend introduced it to us.

Conquer Online has a lot of good points:

PvP- Great PvP System, open PK from level 28+.  If you kill someone, you get PK Points, after a certain amount if you die you go to jail.   You lose PK Points at a rate of 1 every 6 minutes (10 in an hour).  This makes it so you can kill someone who Kill Steals, killed a friend, or is really bugging you, but penalizes PKers. 0 for someone blue, red or black named, 3 Pk Points for killing a guild enemy, 5 for someone who is on your enemy list (killed you) and 10 for anyone else.

Power Level System- Players level 70 or higher will get virtue points for helping newbies level.  These virtue points can be traded in for meteors, experience or used to visit the labyrinth.

Equipment System- The equipment system is very simple, but I haven't seen many like it in other games.  You can upgrade the quality of you equipment using Dragon Balls.  The higher the quality, the better stats the equipment has.  You can put sockets into equipment using Dragon Balls.  Sockets allow you to embed gems into your equipment allowing some customization.  You can add +'s to your equipment using + items and + stones.  +'s add to certain stats of your equipment, such as +boots will increase your dodge.  Finally, one thing that I really enjoyed is you can upgrade the level of your equipment.  In almost all other games I've played, once you were too high level for your equips you sold them and bought new ones.  In Conquer you can use meteors to upgrade equipment levels.
 

Leveling- I'm not saying leveling is a good thing, but certain positive aspects of it are: You can get from level 1-70 very easily.  You get experience per hit on monsters.  When you reach a level ending in 0 or 5, the amount of damage you do to monsters lower level than you doubles (If you are fighting level 77 monsters at level 79 you will do about 2000, at 80 you will do 4000).

I can't really think of all the good things off the top of my head, but now its time for the bad...

The dark side of Conquer Online:

Completely unbalanced for the kids with the most money-  If you pour enough cash into this game, you can get a second reborn character that is level 130-130-135 with full super 2 soc +12 -7% equipments.  I have seen noobs come out of nowhere and become godly before quitting from boredom.

Hacks/Bots- since most of the client information is open, it is very easy to get speed hacks, aim bots and leveling bots.  GMs are starting to do things about it, but in the past they ran rampant.

Pk System Change- before a red name (30 PkP) or black name (100+ PkP) could lose equipment when dying, this created a rush when pking.  Now you can lock items so they can't be dropped at all

Cluttered interface- TQ added a lot of buttons to the interface that can sometimes get in your way

Poor Customer Support- The customer support in the past was worse, it required you to have bought some dragon balls off the website before being helped, luckily the requirement was removed

Lack of original events- the events are pretty much the same, but they are very creative at the same time.  The rewards are the same, usually experience, Heavens Blessing, and double exp for an hour.  Usually you go to a strange map, gather items, get a certain amount of kills, and trade it in for a prize.

 All in all Conquer Online is a great game, but the company behind it is the problem.  Some servers have a great ingame commmunity, while others are full of Egyptians(not to be racist but a lot of them are bad apples) that will pk you for no reason.

TQ has made a lot of changes, in mid 2007-early 2008 they got very greedy and just sucked money out of players.  But lately they have been trying harder and making things easier for non Dragon Ball (DB) Buyers.  The gap still remains thanks to potency.

Upcoming changes include a new item composition method (+ing) and a new class (ninja) I don't know how long it will take for these to be implemented, I would take a guess at most 6 months

I give Conquer Online an 8/10, but I give TQ Digital a 7/10

making my total score for Conquer Online a 7.5/10

If you want to make the most of your conquer online experience follow these steps:

Make a forum account at bbs.co.91.com

Ask around for a good server and introduce yourself on the one you joined, you will make friends and probably get a few free items.

Join a good guild, don't go for the ones that have a lot of members (80+) those are usually ones with very lax rules full of idiots that are KOS (Kill-On-Sight) to strong players.

Make friends, my friends are what kept me coming back

If you get bored, take a break once in a while.  I have "quit" Conquer several times, but after a break and coming back the game seems so much better.

I can't think of much more to say, if you have questions or want to talk PM me on MMORPG.com (I may not answer for a LONG time)

PM me on the conquer online forums, or whisper me Ingame

MMORPG Forum:

tsurano

Conquer Online Forum

DivineJustice

Ingame Names (Diamond Server)

DivineJustice

fireballxp

KiteDancer

snow121

If you are just starting and find me ingame just say you saw my topic on MMORPG.com and I will gladly help by power leveling and if I have some cash i can get you some items.

For most of what you said I would agree. The PvP side of the game is quite fun and fast paced,

The huge downfall though is as you said TQ/NetDragon, with their ability to completely ignore the wishes of the players. Many recent patches have been met with large amounts of players petitioning against them, each being dismissed (If the issues were even looked at to begin with). CO has become a money machine and players are unlikely to get into the top flight characters unless they pay for it.

CO 1.0 was when the game was at its peak for player satisfaction, GM's actually talked to players on the forums and positive changes happened. The game as it is now is still decent but there are better options, unless a few player suggestions get implimented in which case the game could reach its former glory.

I recently quit the game after 4 and a bit years of playing due to recent patches.

Ratings:

CO 1.0 (old) - 9.0

CO 2.0 (current) - 5.0

TQ - 2.0