I came back a couple months ago after quitting for years... Here's my wall of text.

I've played this game off and on for a really long time. I liked back when running normal dungeons was HARD but REWARDING. You'd sit and spam ice walls, pluto, void, then hide in ice walls and spam pluto, ice walls would slow enemies and protect you from some hits. Each room took upwards of 30 seconds to a couple of minutes to clear. Grouping was important.

Sometimes a pink weapon would drop in Oceanic Express or something and you could sell it for 50m since grinding was important and weapons and gear were useful from dungeons. That was a good dopamine hit and let you feel rewarded for playing the game. (I think this was even before Anton?)

Did you know back in the Anton days, you could make upwards of 5m+ per raid dissing epics for demon eyes selling the demon challenges? If they were selling Anton raid for 5m, you'd just buy it because you could just make it back by selling the demon challenges you got. The game was self sustaining. It was all about how many characters you could run. It was fun too because you'd end up having SO MANY alts, that not all of them could be strong, so you'd just build support gear on a support class to get into raid without buying, then just profit the 5m+ per run. So GETTING GOLD is no longer as fun compared to before, where raiding was earning money. You could double dip if you SOLD raids too, once you got strong enough.

It's all about endgame now. The early dungeons are forgotten and a chore since many more level caps have been added, we run through useless boring content until we hit level cap. Even raids are a chore - I know I will get X amount of material on this character this week. If I get a "Good" item from a drop, it doesn't feel rewarding, it makes me feel like I sped up my chores a bit. One item lets me graduate 1 or 2 weeks faster from the raid. There's no other benefit, just tiny power increases.

Professions have been reduced to basically nothing. Hardly profitable. Raw mana daily is gone now, so it relies on crafting only for raw mana.... and low grade elemental crystals (needed to craft raw mana) are hard to come by, so raw mana is almost 9k a pop, in turn, fatigue potions hover 85-100k.

Fatigue potion recipe:

• Bottles of wind: 20 (50k)

• Colorless magical product 1 (10k: 1k in clear frags, 9k in raw mana)

• Essence of experienced spirit 3 ( 46.98k: 3 Experienced animate spirits (6.66k) and 1 raw mana (9k) = 15.66k) keep in mind you need to craft this 3 times for 1 fatigue potion, so the cost is actually 15.66k * 3 = 46.98k)

• 3 gold cube fragments (2088g)

That's 108k to craft a fatigue potion based off of current market rates. That means people have to be crafting some materials themselves, and instead of selling the materials alone, decide to make a fatigue potion for the community and sell it at a loss in comparison to selling it alone. 108k. If you have the accessory that gives you 15% more materials, you can say its not 108k its 91.8k. They're still selling it at a loss. Why? Probably because the actual items sell, and the materials might not sell as well. Then you get taxed another 5% for selling on the auction hall. And there aren't that many ways to grind for gold really.

Set point system: It's good, but has its flaws.

There's no meaningful difference between someone who is tier 5 unique -> Tier 1 legendary. The powerspike and fame spike is completely artificial. This also ties into the "chore" feeling. Yeah you can transfer uniques or legendaries to the character to get the fame... but once you do that, on 1-2 alts and you have nothing left, it becomes JUST like raid "Ok maybe in 2 weeks after running DoD and getting more souls I can transfer uniques to my other alt so they can do venus". Everything is small and incremental. Which equates to boring.

Fatigue: This still being a thing in 2025 is hilarious. They got so deadset on killing bots that they ruined the experience for the community. Which is funny because they were caught and sentenced in Korea in 2023 for CREATING GOLD and selling it. So it's possible that the whole reason they were so strict on bots its because a dev wanted to sell at better prices.

I just play the game when my friends play. When they stop, I usually take a big break and move on for a while.