Ahoy!
Time to write again about the game's current state.
My perspective
To give you an impression of what my perspective is, I'll start talking about me (yay!). Been here since early access with a short break, played all classes to level 80 and full T1 (or better) equip twice, guild officer for several years, raid leader (T1 to T4) for several years, avid solo dungeon runner, occasional forum harmony problems - not allowed to talk about details -, made several suggestions implemented in the game later, suck in PvP, spend my life working and gaming (yay, real life!).
Raiding
Raid dungeons are more or less okay, but suffer from population problems.
Our guild alliance had regular T1, T3 and two T4 raids. T1 and T3 died due to interest / players in the last months. Both T4 raids have serious participation problems. Same seems to be true for several other raids. There're regular, very respectable raids looking for additional players in Global on most days - i. e. they're lacking regulars, which shouldn't happen with the "good" raids at least.
The T4 group I currently happen to lead had to cancel some raids due to lack of players, and currently, we have to fill empty spots via Global. Nothing against guest players (to the contrary - got some pretty cool players to help us), but again, that shouldn't happen with a regular raid, at least not that often. Delays the start, brings a lot difficulties to the raid (language, tactics explanation, loot distribution and so on).
The death of our T1 raid was really sad for me, personally. T1 is easy enough to fool around a little in there and spend time on training new raiders / trying out new classes. Lack of players and motivation killed that. The new loot offers (pets, token exchange and so on) are a nice thought (advocated them on the TL forums extensively). Sadly, it came too late to do anything in my range of vision with the exception of 2-3 people buying weapons in T4 that don't use to drop.
Too little, too late.
Group content
Kithai / Turan / Unchained dungeons don't offer much of an incentive to run them anymore for veteran players.
Personally, I've gotten most stuff I ever wanted from Kithai dungeons for all 12 classes about a year ago.
The new unchained dungeons are nice and all, but completely lack a carrot to make us (or me, at least) to grind them. The gear is nothing to write home about with the exception of some soldier weapons (yay, ub0r soldier loot again! *yawn*). The loot they give might be suited to quickly equip new players / characters, but the skill/experience/gear required to run them is too demanding in my opinion for that purpose. I've seen pretty experienced players fail, really utterly fail on Scorpion Cave. I don't think I'd have the nerves to try that with so called noobs.
The new dungeons focus, in my opinion, too much on running around from A to B to C back to A then to B and C or was it A? oh **** we all died.
The classes, the class abilities are one of the unique points of this game - better use them then "running around", which can be done in more or less every game. It's AoC, not Mario Brothers.
One thing: Never ever design encounters that discriminate against colour blind people. About 8% of your customer base probably are colour blind. It's a slap in the face to present them with a dungeon relying on the ability to tell a green from a red light in a split second*. Really, it's stupid. Also, it's AoC, not Senso.
Sepulcher thingy is okay, though too demanding to the tanks. Scorpion and Caravan are more or less okay (except as noted above) - actually requires DPS, nice change of pace. Final boss in Caravan is stupid, though, at least the barrel throwing part. Remove the adds, encounter is stressful enough without them. Ubahn Karl thingy is not attractive - too long, too stressful, to much running around, Senso action, running around, running around and - yay - running around.
*Disclosure: I'm not color blind.
Solo content
Yeah... what solo content?
People used to come only to do quests, solo dungeons and so on. Thus, they were available for grouping, random raids and so on. Not the case anymore much, though. Quests are all done, everything from solo dungeons farmed to death.
Community
We're loosing players. Fast. That is a problem.
Forum
This forum has a problem. I'm happy to see how the merge turned out. And I'm still amazed about how Funcom claimed the merge to be impossible. The sheer audacity to lie so much into the customers' faces... oh my, I wanted to keep silent about that.
Yes, the forum.
The forum has problems. Sadly, it's one of these not-supposed-to-talk-about-it-things. About harmony, biases, volunteer work and these things. If somebody above the level of first level customer service at Funcom is interested, send me a message and/or get an appointment via Teamspeak. Else... don't.
Payment method trouble
Payment by "Lastschrift" / direct debit apparently was cancelled without notice some weeks ago. It seems Funcom missed updating to the new SEPA banking procedure.
This is a boring, but important topic. I don't know much about how common "Lastschrift" / direct debit is in other ****ries, but in Germany, it's really, really common. People buy their groceries, pay their electrical bill and even their taxes in that way. It's great. It works. It doesn't require a credit card (which is not a very common thing in Germany btw.). Offering a service without accepting direct debit is like trying to sell something in a yard sale against a foreign currency without offering change. Whatever you might want to sell, however great it may be, however good your pices might be - you'll loose customers by that.
We lost about 4 regular raiders to that problem so far. Players important to the raid's ability to succeed. And people I'd like to call friends.
Because of Funcom not caring to update their payment procedures.
Yeah... no. Absolutely no. Not. ****1ng. Acceptable.
This concern may trouble European / German players more than US based players - on secound thought, though, European (and yes, German players) subscriptions have kept this game alive for many years.
The Future
What to do now?
I don't really know. I've started to play Fallout 3 (again).
Maybe the new raids will increase activity again, but I'm sceptical. T3, T4 and T3.5 were not in a state really drawing people in when they were relased, at least in my perspective. If T5 will be the same, i. e. horribly difficult, bugged, annoying... the time spent on them might have been invested better in a poem or planting a tree. That's at least something to have for years to come.
That's it for now.
Khaletohep
P. S.: PvP
Don't care much about PvP. Still not interesting to me. Progression too slow, horrible balancing, not fun to play.