I LOVE MMOs, but the problem is that 99% of them are mediocre. I love what they're trying to do, but they fail at it. Astellia Online Asper is "decent", for MMO standards. However, to me that's still trash. I don't want an mmo that's just the same old, by-the-numbers, generic shite with just a bit of extra polish on it. I wan't MMOs that actually do something unique and interesting instead of just doing the same thing over and over.

Not to mention you said it's not as good as BDO, which to me means that it's pure garbage.

At least the pet management of unsummoning/summoning pets to manage the summoning bar draining and some longer duration raid cooldowns while simultaneously having access to 8 different equipped ones at a time is something new.

It is something to be seen how good or involved that actually is when people learn to optimize endgame.

Most of these MMORPGs fall short because best you'd see is few interesting key features and cut corners with the rest. The problem is exactly that, as you need overall game to be pretty good to hold stable population of players for months.

BDO is kind of a rare example where few things that were done very well and B2P model's accessibility helped maintain stable population for while, rest of the pack simply didn't even make the cut on one or few features/content.

It's a completely generic theme park complete with dailies, LFD/LFR and all the other cancer that disqualifies it as an MMORPG on the spot.

I'm taking a "wait and see" approach. I'll consider playing it if, by November, the game is: still around, still has a healthy population, still hasn't added anything I consider P2W, and isn't going down flaming like Bless Online did. At that time, I'll redo all the research I've done already: looking at up-to-date reviews, reading what the players say, looking at what they've added to/changed in the game, etc.

I get people feeling burned by too many game developers recently, but if you outright deny every game, expecting to be burned just because the game is Korean or died in another market or other such things, well, then you can't expect to ever find a cheap Astellia Online Asper game to play. It's fine - and even smart - to be skeptical, but you're only hurting yourself if you adamantly refuse to play a game that looks interesting to you even after it seems to be more than just a shallow cash grab. Mind you that Astellia in particular has yet to prove anything, but I'm talking about games in general.

I'll wait and see, do research, and make an informed decision.

The population already small tho. Last sunday 10hrs after launch it took me around 20min to find a party for a level 15 dungeons as a healer. The subreddit and forum have some thread but most of them have no replies. I'm playing just waiting for archeage The forum issue isn't all that worrying to me, though.

People are often too busy playing a new game to use its forums aside from the need to ask a question here or there. If the forums don't pick up in a week or so, then I'd say it would be indicative of a very small and probably unhealthy community.

I won one of the 30days keys. I think its an "ok" game if you want to distract yourself for some weeks but i really don't think its gonna last too much because they doing the same as bless locking existing content. One thing that really bothers me is they only unlocked female genders for all classes so far, no idea how much they gonna take for the males and lack of different armors.

Cant get into the game if i don't even like watching my character but that's just me. Do you want to be an old wizard killing monsters left and right? tough shit you're a.