Unfortunately, a few months ago, I was forced to cancel my sub (hopefully temporarily) due to money and time reasons.

Well, things are a little better time-wise now, but not so much money-wise.

Either way, I kinda miss the game, so I started a free account. I decided to walk the world of Istaria again, this time with a completely fresh start (not that I have a choice lol).

I thought I'd see the game from a new player's point of view, to see what they see.

I haven't gotten far Yet; I've decided upon going Cleric > Paladin and doing whatever crafts I need to keep myself supplied.

Thus far, I've finished the Spirit Isle quests and I'm now working on my crafts. Miner is 6 and I'm starting to pull up the very rare 4s per dig, with a few 3s and lots of 2s so that's nice. I'm also now 4:1 on Bronze so that helps.

The game seems a bit better now, though I notice that some of the popup help messages still aren't spawning in quite the right places (but if you think about what its saying you can still kinda-sorta figure out what it was meant to do), and I noticed that signs are now working in Win7 64-bit again (where they weren't last I played).

Haven't played long enough to make many other observations other than the Refurb Cargo disk (awesome idea!) and the more visible quest bubbles help a bit too.

So far, so good!