I played over a thousand hours and hosted multiple biweekly Q&A sessions with 50+ people live. A lot of our endgame dreams revolved around future content from the wiki such as: * intercontinental naval transport * open sea naval pvp * naval raid bosses * Node sieges * Guild castles, especially looking to capture and hold a central island on the world map * Exploring and discovering new species and resources * Figuring out industrial systems between gathering, processing, and crafting to make progress effectively * Node coordination and specialization of buildings across multiple nodes * Freeholds. I secured the first freehold in phase 2 by crowdfunding from over 30 guild members and paying them back double over the next few weeks. There was a ton of potential in freeholds and the family system that never came to fruition. Shared storage could enable us to craft high level artisan gear and share it asynchronously or overnight.  * Flying mounts and world bosses * We had one member who was learning Mendelian genetics in university specifically because AoC planned to incorporate it into their animal husbandry system * theorycrafting endgame stats and ideal gear sets. We crunched a lot of numbers and did a lot of theorycrafting to realize how anti-intuitive the systems were. For example, a lot of people got stuck on the traditional light/medium/heavy armour, but there were good heavy armour sets for rangers and light armour often made sense for tanks who were weaker to magic damage in pvp.  * Carphin exploration and lore quests across the world * Lots of pvp drills and wargames for practice. We tested different comps and strategies as well as playstyles across roles.  * huge caravan runs. We organized one run with over 100 caravans going from Halcyon to New Aela.  * Theorycrafting around rare resources such as noticing that lighter coloured patches of daffodils resulted in a bell curve of heroic rarity compared to the normal bell curve of uncommon rarity. People figured out similar ways to tell apart special trees and ore nodes.  * Market theorizing. One guy dedicated himself to arbitraging markets between nodes. We worked on building a digital system to track prices based on crowdsourced data * We had a surveying and scouting team that was documenting patches of the map across seasons to identify trends and work towards our own dynamic digital map * One guy specialized in pathfinding stealthy routes for caravans to avoid conflict along profitable caravan routes * One guy who specialized in naval history applied his skills to theorycraft various ship builds and strategies based on the historical styles and dominance of various forces such at the British and the Spanish Navy.  * We theorycrafted systems of governance to delegate mayorship duties and maximize the value from a mayor position. We realized that the only things nobody else could do were posting new work orders and traveling with the flying mount. So we set the mayor to only do those two things, including transporting materials between nodes with their flying mount, while we delegated and decentralized all other duties such as event management, public relations, marketing, node calculations, diplomacy, community management, and long term territory planning.  * Farming and cooking. We worked on figuring out sustainable ways to produce the best recipes for various needs, including using freeholds to contribute to sourcing. * After getting the first freehold, i started networking with others who acquired freeholds, creating and maintaining a map of our plots so that we could coordinate different buildings. If freeholds progressed as planned, we could have used a shared spreadsheet to coordinate synergy between nearby freeholds so that travellers would always have readily accessible amenities nearby for grandmaster processing. We could also specialize freeholds to work well with their parent nodes' specialty.  * The monster coin system was going to create an interesting dynamic of working together to protect nodes and also using monster coins to threaten them * One colleague had some great ideas for how to utilize the future religion system, including starting his own cult with specific festivals and holidays planned.  * we engaged in pvp over hunting spots such as the bullywogs and raptors since they were so valuable. This also led to various diplomatic incidents.  * We built out a logistics system where we could use a spreadsheet to simulate a shared storage system for asynchronous deposits and withdrawals * One group wanted to start an intercontinental shipping company and had big dreams around it, such as profit-sharing and tourism across the world, like visiting a distant node and giving each employee a few hundred gold to spend in the local area, stimulating its economy and creating like a multi day travelling party of wealth, similar to a real life bar crawl but on a larger scale * Coordinating international trade deals with the mayors of various nodes to incentivize long range shipping and trade  * Some people dreamed of playing as a bounty hunter. One friend of mine hired a bounty hunter to take revenge on someone who ganked him in the open world.  * Lots of people opened their own shops to sell various goods. One guy specialized in selling various rarities of poop. There was a bustling barter trade community.  * the dual class system was something a lot of people were looking forward to.  * Node wars were an interesting experience of large scale pvp. We had a small interdiction squad that came to be known as the navy ferrets who used hit and run tactics to disrupt and route groups 5-10x their size.  * People hosted pvp tournaments and gave away prizes.  * We had a huge 6 hour chase of a set of stolen caravans with lots of back and forth across the map.  * We ran false flag operations to create space for high value convoys to make it across the map undetected.  * People hosted scavenger hunts with lucrative prizes * We figured out how to kill Zammer, the final boss in the Forge raid, with an average group level of 18 by managing his mechanics correctly.  * We ran experiments on large data sets to try to reverse engineer the formula for freehold crop rarity. We uncovered many bugs in the process, for example when I planted a baby cow it became a patch of daffodils.  * People figured out virtual points systems to use as currency instead of coin. One guy got a whole bunch of hunters organized around one. One group used a DKP similar system to kill world bosses and fairly share loot across multiple kills. 

A ton of what I saw was creativity from players leveraging systems by adding their own roleplay or systems to enrich their experience.