;)
A very important part of any MMO is its community. The players make the game. The world isn't alive without the people in it. Otherwise it might as well be a single player game. I personally found the community hit and miss. The forums for the game seem to be full of life, but in game you never know if you'll find a helping hand or get trash talked. I did experience some random helpful people, and my crew were all very helpful and nice. Unfortunately overall I didn't feel the community made me feel like I was part of it and part of this world that I was here to enjoy. This is not to say that the community is elitist, because I don't think that's it. It felt more like it was every man for himself, lonely. The world is a big one; the social part of it needs to be there to stop it from feeling like a very large one player game.
For me the support for a game can be very important. If I have a problem I like to know that I can get help as soon as possible. Since I've been playing I only experienced one real problem, so I logged a ticket. I needed to know how the game support handled, unfortunately not very well. Once I finally puzzled out how to send in a ticket to the support team, I sent it off with as much information as I could think to provide. I got a reply in about 24 hours, which I guess isn't so bad, but I didn't actually talk to anyone. The reply came in the form of an in game mail with no real help and instructions to send in another ticket, but as a bug. Later I found that the problem I was having wasn't a bug but part of the game mechanic that I was unaware of, something that should have been told to me by the support team instead of being told to file a bug report.
To me, getting a form mail from support with no real help isn't a good way to handle support. Even if they were unaware of how to fix the problem, I would have much preferred to have spoken directly with someone.
Something else that falls indirectly under the support heading is the download of the client. The initial download is only about 5MB in size. Of course that's not the end of it though. After the install you have to sit through 5GB of patching. This was very frustrating and annoying. Even with a high speed connection this took 4 hours to complete.
Overall I do like the game, but its positives don't out weigh its bad points. The world is lovely and the gameplay good, but it really felt very lonely playing it. I play an MMO partially for the joy of the game and partially for the social aspect. After all, what's the point of playing an MMO if I'm going to play on my own? If you've got friends to go play with then I think you could enjoy this game. Give it a try though. What I don't like others may enjoy.
