Today it will be more for people already playing PWI because some of the things described are related only to PWI and not to gaming in general.
The more I play PWI and read through forums and various blogs, the more I’m decided that my $50 were the first and the last I invested in the game. Should I invest more to buy some material that has insanely low drop-rate? Because so it seems. Many events in this game are not fun, they are cash shop oriented. Most news are about cash shop, new items, new dress sets. Even patch notes are dominated by events – mostly somehow related to cash shop. OK, I know that money are important for development. But can’t developers fix some bugs and balance the game that even non-paying players can play it normally?
We couldn’t gather this tree root. Cursor didn’t change to gathering function.
Non paying customers are slower, die more often unless very careful, there are tons of differences… why to push players to buy things like this? The whole Archosaur was full of people buying rough fur (of course for 1k or lower 
) and only few of them are selling (5k typically) – luckily the drop-rate for this particular item has changed recently and now it’s OK. The same goes for dragon quests items… my friend went crazy when someone wanted third pack of 10 element fragments in one quest! Element fragment was also my first “stupid quest” with Blobs of rebirth… they dropped it VERY rarely and to get 5 for everyone in a squad was crazy. But Soft fur? No problem, surplus all the time, everybody sells it. Something is flawed in item distribution. In case of materials you can still buy them. It is stupid if you’re willing to grind it – but you simply can’t because of your level – high level means that low level items drop insanely rarely. In case of dragon quest (DQ) items it’s not possible to buy them. Luckily – I’ve read a guide how to get rich (in-game coins, not in real life 
) and one of the important point is not doing DQs at all because you just run around the whole map – or spend even more coins on teleports – and provide DQ items to various NPC. If you just sell it to them you can get hundreds of thousands of coins.
My barbarian LOLs in a very funny way. No facial expression – and his big axe disappears.
There are simply many little things that players should learn before they find out that this and that is complete waste of time and nerves. For example – on level 30 you can achieve Rank I and then you can get rank-1 items from NPC near General Summer in Archosaur. No problem. But on level 40 – when you in theory could progress to Rank II – you will find out that you have little “reputation” which is one of the characteristics. Reputation is gained for quests and you can improve your situation doing cyclic quests (“solo”) or helping with FBs. My situation is that I’m on level 48, I have 800 reputation and need 1000 (I needed it on level 40 reportedly!). Why I’m in so deep… troubles? Well, because I have few boss related quests unfinished. It’s quite complicated to set up proper party to kill really difficult bosses, you want to do it with your friend rather – but 3 is too little and who has 5-6 friends playing the same game with you? Sure, you can enter some faction/guild and they should help you – that’s true. Our faction is friendly – but small. Maybe I will reconsider this later. Sure thing is I’m not the only one having problems with reputation. Rank I things were cool for my wizard, but players report that Rank II equipment is too little too late. But – to be motivated – there are reports that Rank 8 (or whatever the number was) reward is spectacular. But how to get high reputation without leveling? Should I die often to lower my experiences? Then you read on forums that Rank/reputation and (again) DQ are simply badly designed and they are not worth the effort. So… now be smart!
On level 30 you’ll get your flying gear so you can fly even when you’re not winged elf!
Is it really so despairing? Well… no. If you have good solo build you don’t even need friends for normal situations. Wizards and supporting clerics however have hard times beating the monster of equal level and it’s good for them to be in the party. Wizard and cleric together are good enough squad actually because there is no need for tank for most of the quests. Another important point is – have fun. Follow quests, ignore DQs, ignore reputation issues – this all is not the most important part of the game. Rather get recruited by some decent faction and try Territory Wars (TW) – it may be fun. But I have to try this yet. There is also very good way how to get cash shop items without really buying them – simply buy them for coins in-game from other players! Generally $1 is equal to 100.000 coins – which is something you can grind from monsters in 90 minutes on level 40 (maybe more, maybe less, it depends on class/build too). Of course, $20 enhanced jaguar (big black cat that runs fast like hell and you can ride it) means 30 hours of mindless grinding without spending any coins. But it is possible.
Some places are just so romantic… if you like spiders for that matter.
Also – the events can be fun sometimes. Recently there are snowmen in major cities. Killing them gives you a lot of experiences (especially on lower levels) and it’s one hit kill without any risk. There are some drops that you can… ok, here my knowledge ends, because there are few more NPCs added for this event, it’s a lot of gathering, combining – and because I have bad feeling about most of the events on PWI I simply sell all items and go on with my grinding, life, etc. It’s also no fun to kill some snowman before anyone else does because in such a crowd even ~200 ms ping counts. But it’s funny to see the whole world running around the Archosaur with bows (whatever the class is, all of them ran to their home cities to buy the cheapest bow ).
Dying snowman always says something funny.
Perfect World is far from perfect – nothing can be perfect, right? Every week there is a patch bringing some new item to cash shop, or sale (in the cash shop) or some event (related mostly to cash shop). There are bugs, some of them just visual, some of them really ugly. Player movement is laggy, netcode is pretty bad in my eyes (I think MMORPG should run smoothly with ping ~200 ms), game lacks proper customization but… I still play it.
Gorgeous view across Etherblade city.
While I wasn’t able to overcome missing control redefinition in Sacred, I can in PWI – god knows why. Too bad there are not more bug fixes in every patch and some skill balancing – because now there are some classes with some skills considered complete waste whatever build type you choose. But I have to finish as always – I paid for some games already and most of them had some bugs. PWI has probably a bit more of them, but it looks great, plays OK (if you can live with some issues) and if you play it with friends it can be real fun.
