That is nice you have a few friends that might play the game, But free week ends are supposed to be about a much bigger cause, Your friends will have to wait, if you yourself can not convince them to play at this time.
We do not need another free weekend at this time. I was 100% against the 1st free weekend they put out, and I hope the damage caused by that will not be as bad as I think it might be.
The NPE (New Player Experience) in this game is extremely bad for the „casual“ player, Or the kind of player who doesn’t have enough gaming experience to be able to learn on their own, put things together, and most of all, experiment with everything in the game. Because the type of players this game attracts is more likely to be the kind of player who will start to give up the moment something becomes confusing or difficult, the NPE needs alot of work.
This absolutely must be done before the devs even consider doing another free weekend.
Then there is the lack of content that will keep causing players to quit, Even new players will quit from lack of content, as content is lacking at all phases of the game. All the friends I have gotten to play this game, quit after about 2 or 3 weeks due to this.
There is the problem with beacon fuel, While I personally think the system is fine, and the players just aren’t paying attention… It is creating a problem, Somewhere, the importance of beacon fuel is not being stressed enough, or the warning signs are not obnoxious enough for players to pay attention to them. I feel a few too many people have quit due to them losing just about everything. This may be another fault of having a bad NPE system
The leveling up system needs to be slightly redesigned, This is the only game that I have played where leveling up gives you an item you need to open, In other games, when you level up, you are just simply given the stat points and anything else automatically, and to further turn it into a problem, is the fact the level up boxes, look quite alot like RNG loot boxes, even if they aren’t it is an extremely bad 1st impression for reasons that should be obvious to most people. The feat reward system might also need to be looked at too,
Lore, This is nearly non existent, We get one text block at the start of the game with a tiny bit of lore/story line in it, and that is it, no more. A story line can give players a motivation to keep playing, because they want to find out more, and can take the edge off of some aspects of the grind, With out a storyline, I am sure some players will lose motivation, It is important in an MMO game to have lore.
There are other problems that need to be fixed that can be damaging for the new player if they remain as is, but I think this is enough words for now.
The bottom line from me is;
No More Free Weekends, Not until this game is actually in Post-Beta state, And I am not talking about version numbers, I am referring how the game feels in terms of completeness and polish.
I feel that each free weekend they do that turns out to be a flop will damage the potential success of the next free weekend by quite an amount.