This is something I wish didn't happen: after hiting one year the state of AOC is EXACLY where it has been six months ago. I might just do copy/paste job and call it a day, but lets go over these one more time:
The good:
DX10 - you will probably not use it if you are a "KESH pvper". It's mostly used to stroke epeens of people who have the BALLS to post their cpu speccs in their sigs (who the hell does that?). It looks great non the less so I guess it should be counted as an improvment.
Rating: 9/10
The bad:
Crafting - crafting is nonexistent in this game. Still.
Rating: 1/10 EPIC FAIL
Itemization - Ever since I did about 15 epic KESH runs I am wearing same gear with sloooowly added pvp gear which takes forever to get.
Rating: 1/10 EPIC FAIL
PVP minigames - currently dominated by premade groups with casters. The only way to win is the get somewhat equal number of casters.
Rating: 2/10
PVP XP - pvp progression got turned into joke. Biggest guilds do "Nekid RP" to get to lvl 5 in no time. Your achievment as honest pvper is meaningless - there are tons of lvl 5 exploiters.
Rating: 1/10 EPIC FAIL
Class balance - Same old same old. Just roll a TOS.
Rating: 1/10 EPIC FAIL
Criminal/murderer system - it got turned from "broken" to "nonexistant". It is used to let your buddies get more PVP XP for killing you so they can reach lvl 5 faster.
Rating: 0/10 LEGENDARY FAIL
Open world PVP - log on, go to KESH, zerg or die. Here is your content, enjoy. The "Cimmerian Boredom Kingdoms" died in two weeks, it was HUGE waste of time to development time and a big letdown.
Rating: 0/10 LEGENDARY FAIL
Guild dyplomacy tools - There are none. There is no support for guilds and server politics in AOC.
Rating: 0/10 LEGENDARY FAIL
Guild city - Ghost towns. Same crappy buildings with bare walls inside them. Fun!
Rating: 0/10 LEGENDARY FAIL
RP support - GMs no longer act on RP ruleset infraction. Go ahead and make your "Supadupa" Barbarian, you won't get namelocked. Instead of social clothing we got "/fart" emote 0_o
Rating: 0/10 LEGENDAY FAIL
80lvl content for non Raiders - we got Slaughterhouse, somewhat neat solo instance. Even thou I like it a lot, its too little to cover "conent for 80lvls". The Xibaluku (or whatever its called) instance was popular for like 2 weeks, you won't get group for it even inside big guild (everyone would rather raid) not to mention PUG.
Rating: 3/10
Updates - it takes forever for Funcom to do any update.
Rating: 2/10
Keeping the dates/giving out ETAs for updates - they doesn't.
Rating:1/10
Don't care about:
I don't care about PVE/Raid content.
I can honestly say that with 6 months of development time was wasted. Yes, there is a mythical beast called 1.5, but it didn't come out today (not that it should) so I can't review content that isn't live yet. This is where we stand right now. Yes, there have been some progress, but no more than a drunk makes by falling over.
