I just got off retail and I wish I never went on to begin with.
I indulged in my nostalgia for around five hours and just kinda... quit. I am very disappointed. The game feels very hollow from what it was back in 2001-2002. Very depressing. I saw maybe 6 people in my entire romp levels 1-19 and I began to question if I accidentally loaded up my private server on accident. Ran into low-level RvR and... ran home. No one was there and there were no hints of other people. Kinda very depressing.
Something that kind of bothered me though... lots of typos and quests that haven't been updated since the new-new quest changes that track the general quest area on your map. Some quest descriptions for my enchanter epic were very... vague and it made me just throw the quest into the "never again" bin. The UI has had an attempt to be updated but it still requires a lot of updates to make it better for someone that is new to the game. They dumbed down the styles and their numbers... so now you do not have to think "wow, is .56 out of 100 good on damage output?"
The game feels helplessly dead. No one talks in /b or /region unless it's a "HELP" question. But something I noticed was that trial accounts cannot even broadcast for help... so they have to use the /who [region] function and send to someone for help. But the chances of help are... none. Those that ask for help in /b-/r are just trolled.
"Hey guys, how do I get out of tutorial?" "Oh, it's easy, you just exit the game and hit uninstall retard." As an experiment, I tried sending to random people, asking for help, and got pretty much the same response, some more vulgar. I pretended to be someone new to the game and that seemed to open me up to further exploitation. Disgusting.
EA might as well just post the code for everyone at this point. The community's a bunch of elitist shits and their game feels so stale that I really don't want to jump back in to get my character to 50. Also, only 10 Ewain servers? Good lord. Might as well just merge them all together because, again, there's NO ONE to be found in a 10mil radius. I didn't even see people in Tir Na Nog.
I honestly think it's about done, guys. If they axed WAR (which was a fair enough game for those that enjoyed it) and Mythic, I'm betting that DAoC is next. The game's obviously not getting the good publicity they hoped for with this Steam thing. It doesn't help that whatever new blood that tries to flow in is completely unwelcome.
Time to update the DOL downloads page to have a link to the 1.98 client. *teehee*