Finally got it working. The game is patched by a torrent and as usual any MMORPG maker's torrent client (including Blizzard) is a lot worse than what you can download for free anywhere else. Thankfully you can just open the torrent files with a real torrent tool and not get stuck at random percentages. Seems like you can throttle your upload rate with no penalty, though it doesn't seem to help much with download rate. I think MMORPG makers just need to stop thinking they can steal people's bandwidth and use torrents as an effective form of distribution. It might work for piracy but for whatever reason it doesn't work for stuff like this. I think the problem here is that there's really no penalty to throttle your upload and/or quit the moment you're done so the game maker still ends up have to pony up the majority of the bandwidth but then they go cheap on the bandwidth thinking the magic of torrents is supposed to solve the problem.
The game crashes pretty often if you try to hit more than 3 keys in a row that's not a number, though it's hard to tell if that's what's crashing it with the server crashing on its own. Now having buggy software is not a huge issue (though I had stuff crash less often in a month than FF14 does in one day) except if you crash during the middle of a Guildleve you automatically fail it and have to go back to town to start over. I think if you abandon a Guildleve it counts against you in one of the 8 you can do in 2 days, so if there's something that it looks like you can't finish just disconnect so it won't count against you (better make a trip to town than have an abandoned one count against your limit) assuming it's doable.
The game's path is really, really slow. Some of it is deliberate but some is just stupid, like it takes a few seconds to load up your quest journal to figure out where you're supposed to go next. When fighting multiple-mob groups get used to dying because 2 mobs will hit you 4 rounds while you're trying to target them after you killed the first mob. The game responds to commands slowly, but I can't tell if that's because it's designed that way or that the server is just that bad (it was in the red range on ping constantly and hiccups are noticeable). For some reason Sqix failed to hide the number of people on server so I can tell there are 950 people on my server and that's considered a full load. It seems very obvious that they have no idea how to get the hardware part working since a MMORPG should not be choking on 950 players per world.
Right now it seems like you're supposed to do your 8 leves per 2 days (which takes about an hour at the most assuming you didn't get stuck on the terrain somewhere) and then not come back, so I guess in theory the XP cap isn't a big deal because you can only play like 2 hours every 2 days so you're never in danger of exceeding the cap. There's a serious dearth of content. I don't necessarily thinking having a bizillion 'kill 10 rats' quests are content but right now you can't even grind on mobs if you wanted because there just isn't very much stuff out there to kill. From wandering around/getting lost it looks like there are some good spots to grind stuff on but it's impossible to tell what level range they might be so I have no idea how accessible it is. Having high level non aggro mobs that randomly walk next to you so they can hit by your AE (there are a ton of AEs in this game) and then promptly kill you is very stupid, though I guess eventually when you get high enough this wouldn't be a problem.
The guildleves are actually kind of interesting, but it's not clear to me what you're supposed to do once you're done with your 8. Their difficulty also goes all over the place. I can beat a solo level 10 lev at level 6, except the one that involves Dodos where I can't even kill the first one but they're ranked exactly the same difficulty. At a rough guess I'd say a 1 star (solo) level 10 lev is between 3 stars and 4 stars level 1 lev, so I guess you're supposed to form a party and grind the 5 stars levs so you won't just breeze through them (and lev mobs give elevated XP) and ran out of stuff to do.
