This is also from Embers Adrift , which has been down for a few days due to a hardware problem at thee server end. I don't know whether I'll bother playing it again, despite having just bought another month's subscription. It's old-school in many respects, such as having to run for your bag when your character is killed, and it has an interesting mechanic whereby if you kill a mob close to one of its movable dungeons ("ember veins") then it could come back immediately at half strength (its ember version). This means you start off fighting one mob, then it becomes two, and any passing mobs that see you and join in could also become two. I've started a fight with one mob and ended up having to kill eight of them.
The game is very grindy. There's content for groups (and I did join a guild this time round, which I don't usually do so in an MMO I'm expecting to leave after a few weeks), but little for solo players. There are also content deserts for group play. I'm currently level 38 out of 50, and progress is very slow. The only way to get experience points and go up levels is to kill mobs or do zone-based noticeboard quests to kill a number of specific mobs. Other quests give no XP except incidentally, by having to kill a ton of mobs between you and the treasure. Unfortunately, one of the zones I've been grinding mobs in gave me a noticeboard quest to kill ten or so hard mobs (which I did) plus three more such mobs of a particular kind. These mobs are only available inside or next to a specific moveable dungeon, and are too high a level for me even to scratch. I'm having to do similar quests in a different zone where the mobs don't give me as much XP. Most of these involve killing spiders. I've killed over 800 of them so far, and the quests keep coming. Grinding is always boring, but Embers Adrift takes it to a new level. I get some kind of reward if I kill a thousand of them.
All mobs hate player characters. Almost all are friends with all other mobs, but there are some set-piece fights between particular mobs (a specific big cat that wanders will attack a specific spiny bunny if they meet up). The default is that they're all chummy: you find wolves and bears co-existing with deer, and raccoons living alongside crocodiles and giant spiders. Nothing seems to eat rats, not even rats.
There are some odd balance problems. Story quests that are super-hard and need a group to complete give a reward of gear that's below the gear level you needed to have to complete them. Simple quests to introduce you to a zone are often much, much harder to complete than finding your own way. Crafting is no more difficult than gathering, and does produce useful items. I really don't need a couple of hundred healing potions, though.
The game does have a lot of charm, though, and has so few players that socially it feels like an old-style text MUD except with graphics. There isn't a lot of information about it online, so you have to ask other players or work things out yourself rather than simply look it up. Having a small population is quite refreshing, and one of the reasons I joined a guild. I wasn't expecting to spend 339 hours playing it when I started, but I have done so far. I might drop in to tell my guildies I'm considering quitting, but they themselves may not be around for much longer as they're thinking of leaving too (for Monsters and Memories, which a couple of them played in the beta). My character is a healer, as usual, which is very useful for group content; as there's no group content to do in this level range, though, they're not missing much by my absence.
As for what I'll be playing when I do quit, well it's BAFTA time so I've been trying out some of the games on the Best Game list (there's nearly a hundred of them, of which I've played 31 so far at a rate of two or three a day). Some of these are very good, and I'll be coming back to them later. Others are reworkings of other games, or the same mechanics with different dressings. Some are original but don't work, although others do. A few need VR goggles, so I won't be playing those, and there are several that have a theme I don't like so I'll put those off until I can grit my teeth enough to give them a shot.
Oh, and I may have taken advantage of Embers Adrift's hardware problems to start up a character in Aion 2, too.