I do not recommend this game to people who don't regularly play MMOs.
I have an addictive personality and even I don't want to continue playing this game. Not even if it was completely free. Maybe it's because I'm bright enough to see MMO devs for what they really are, soulless pushers wanting no more than to turn a profit. Thank god I bought this game with graduation money.
To begin, I'll quickly list off the things about AoC I liked.
1. A couple innovative classes: There are the typical soldiers, with one being completely disposed to tanking and the other to dps (which is stupid), a ranger, a priest with powerful dps, an assassin who is a shameless ripoff of WoW's rogue, a necromancer whose pets do not tank at all, a demonologist who is a shameless ripoff of WoW's warlock, and another priest with powerful dps. But, they also included a Barbarian which is not really innovative but still a fresh face on the MMO scene. There is a bear shaman, who is a priest and challenging to play at first, but decent at taking damage and melee dps. There is a dark templar, which could have had a more imaginative name, but he's a good melee/caster. And there is the Herald of Xotli, who is a caster who can turn into a badass demon melee class.
2. Gore and female nudity: Yes, it is the first M rated MMO. Nothing to great about that but its a small quirk that I need to get out of the way. When I say "female nudity" I mean that sometimes you will see a female character walking around with big(because nobody made their characters with average sized), exposed tits with grainy nipples that are obscured by ridiculous chest tattoos. And this is if you're zoomed in close. Whatever. But the gore is fun. With fatalities, you can rip people's heads off, slice them off, slice off their arms and then the head, stick a sword in their gut and yank it out with blood squirting everywhere, stick a sword in their gut and break their neck, stick a sword in their gut and scream in their face, and stab them in the jugular with blood squirting everywhere, to name a few. This is fun because it only happens every once in a while (if you kill a mob with a critical combo), and it also buffs you up for a short while. However, you can pretty much have the same experience for free by looking at the fatality videos on youtube. Thanks, web 2.0!
3. Other fun things to look at that aren't gory: The landscapes are pretty amazing, if your machine has the intelligence to handle the high display settings. They are authentic, nowhere similar to the cartoony graphics of WoW or the overly fruity bloom-heavy visuals of X Korean MMORPG. The NPC characters have just the right amount of personality, none look or sound the same. Oh, but what's this? After you make level 19 and get off noob island, there's no more voice acting. Only in the storyline quests. What the hell?
4. Quests are fucking easy: Just follow the orange arrow. While this subtracts from the difficulty some, and also takes you out of the game experience (since you can just skip a whole convo and go straight to the next location) It's useful if I just don't feel like listening to that god-damned vague frenchish russianish persian accent or if I take a whole lot of quests for one area but I don't remember where they all are or what I'm doing.
Now on to the things that suck about this game:
1. Lots of shitty environment glitches and no help in sight: Falling through levels, walking through walls, being blocked by invisible walls. These problems have existed for a while and I haven't seen them being fixed. There was a glitch where there was a small invisible wall right smack dab in the middle of the fucking town you're always in on the noob island that didn't get fixed at all, not after I continued noticing it for two weeks (I made many alts). Typing /stuck does not unstick you or get a GM to talk to you. Here's a fun story:
One time I walked into the tavern where my main storyline quest giver always is. When you walk in, a loading screen appears, making you assume it is an instanced area. Not much later I fell through the floor and down several metres into the sea. I looked up and I could see the interior of the tavern through an invisible floor. I was in the middle of a sea not too far from a coastal cliff. I immediately typed /stuck. I swam around for about 5 minutes and after no help arrived I decided to swim to the coast. The coast was pretty flat but sharply turned up into a mountain. I walked onto dry land, up a hill, next thing I knew I was running and jumping up a very steep mountain much like C.J. could with a bike in San Andreas. I blasted up the whole mountain and after about 10 minutes of running and finding less sloped areas where I could move up, I made it to the summit. I looked down, and I was literally on top of the mountain that you can only see in the background when you're running around the island. I could see the volcano and the town. I ran down past the volcano, then finally to a river, which I swam down for a while and ended up back in the jungle just outside town. I saw people running around. I ran all the way from one end of the island (in an "instanced" area) back to the main urban center. And I still never recieved any /stuck help.
Funcom spent most of their time in patches fixing class imbalances. They should have fixed their environment glitches first and foremost, and it probably wouldn't hurt to hire some competent GMs.
2. No mercy for altoholics/people who like to see different things every once in a while: I like creating alts because I like a varied game experience. If you like to do this too, stay the hell away from AoC. All new characters must spend the first 19 levels in the same damn place, doing the same damn quests. WoW has 8 different starting areas (10 with BC), and you can go to many different areas and you're usually done with an area after 10 levels. AoC has one starting area, and three major cities where I can say at least two of them are a pain in the ass to navigate. The other questing areas are too big and you just spend too much time in them, looking at the same damn things.
3. Multiplayer aspect/PvP sucks a fat cock: The PvP is consequenceless. And not like in Eve where they balance it out by implementing a risk/reward aspect. There's no reward for killing anybody at all except for your pvp level, which is pretty much useless. You can be attacked anywhere outside the city by anyone anytime. You can be attacked in villages if the guards aren't looking. And last and worst of all, you have to fucking share instances with other people. That's right, if you have a quest in one area in a dungeon or instanced area you have to deal with other people ganking you. It's bullshit.
4. It's fucking boring: If you play a melee class, you'll just want to kill yourself. The combat system (no auto attack with directional attacks you tactically employ in real time) is a noble idea but in reality the novelty wears thin quickly. Even if you're not a melee class, casting the same damn spells over and over again on the same weak mobs gets boring very quickly. Trust me on this.
Moral of the story: Don't buy AoC. Moral of the big picture: Don't buy MMOs.