I did not play in the beta, but I did purchase the le edition. I've only played a little bit here and there, so right now my pugilist is only physical level 9, pug level 7, I think.
I think I'll play a little more tonight, but honestly, unless the game changes drastically over the next month (or, perhaps when you hit a certain level?), I doubt I'll play anymore after the free month is up.
Generally, I like playing mmo's, but I am a casual player by anyone's book. I mostly like solo questing in any game I play, with grouping only when I have to. I dont like tradeskilling, finding them tedious in most every game I've ever played. Although I've been known to just grind mindlessly on mobs to raise my level, I don't particularly care for it.
The first hurdle I ran into is the ui system. I expected it wasn't going to be that good, since it was designed with a console in mind. That premonition turned out quite accurate. But, the targetting is quite bad. The rest of the ui is bearable, but not that.
Next would be...what the heck am I actually supposed to be doing? It doesn't take long to get through the little opening quest series. Are there any more? I haven't found any. You do get to do 8 of the guildleves (or whatever they are called), but I've only found 4 for my level range. Perhaps there are more for the level 10 camp? Even if so, I can knock out all 4 of the early ones in about 35 minutes. Even if we doubled that to the 8 max...thats about an hour of gameplay every 2 days? What next? Are there some quests I'm missing here? And yeah, I kind of figure grouping would fix this at least a tiny bit, by being able to share the leves across everyone.
Which sort of leads into my final point. I can understand some game manufacturers don't want to give away game mechanics and lore on the first day. But, I think they could probably give out more than I've found, which has been next to none. What do those stat points I keep spending when I level up actually do? They sound sort of self explanatory, but are they really? Those favor points I use when I start up a leve, or those anima (?) points I've used one time when I was to lazy to walk back to camp, do those ever go back up again? They don't seem to. I could keep going.
Perhaps all the things that puzzle me about the game are explained somewhere, in some menu or tutorial I haven't found yet. I assume there are probably already websites and wikis already springing up with knowledge bases on exactly how to play this game. But, my time is limited now, and any game that actually makes me jump through hoops to actually understand some of the game basics, or, most especially, not give me enough to do to actually keep me busy...well, they don't really want me as a customer, I guess.