Lets keep it all civil here please. No need to attack a person for what they say or believe.

Jessica, thank you for playing Istaria and for taking the time to post here. We're glad to have you all and we hope you will all keep playing for a long time. Dragons are not part of the free-to-play account because they are one of the main draws of the game and as others have mentioned we do need to make some money to keep the game running.

We chose humans because after Dragons humans are the most played character race. And, we want to encourage players to try the game for free, decide if they like it enough to stick around, and then hopefully when they choose to do so they will decide that its worth paying for! We certainly think it is!

cageddestroyer, I appreciate your feedback. Many MMOs these days are going F2P, but all have their "catches" and hooks - from lack of quests, to faster leveling or special items, to more races/classes, and much more. All of which is available in a micro-transaction store. We considered this and decided that for Istaria the current setup would work better since players were already comfortable with a subscription style system.

As for the graphics, I believe that was discussed in another thread. Overhauls of graphical engines are not undertaken lightly, nor cheaply, and in our case isn't really feasible. So, for now, as far as art and graphics go, we'll keep working on improving things where we can (texture caching/compositing, terrain and world object caching, model improvements (poly counts and so forth) and so on.