I enjoyed playing ~12 hours (estimate, probably low - reached level 20) during the recent beta. I feel good about my pack purchase and look forward to playing the game at launch. The game looks great, and I enjoy the complex combat.

That said, I wanted to provide some feedback from the perspective of someone not deeply steeped in MMOs. I played a little bit of City of Heroes back in the day, and ~60 levels in WOW. Coming to this game turned out to be more confusing than I expected. Not to PLAY, mind you - that was fine. In fact, my feedback to the in game surveys was "too easy" for the PVE portions. But to actually understand what was going on? Here are a few examples of questions I asked myself:

The Economy

Just how many currencies are there in this game? And how the heck do they interact? Blade And Soul Gold-Silver-Copper was fine, of course. (But strangely useless - see below) NCoins were pretty clear. But then we had Red Beans, Hongmoon Coins and Premium Points. That was less clear and required tracking down things to read and watch online.

Since I can't call the client up at the moment (Beta weekend is over), I may make mistakes in terminology here. There are what I thought of as pseudo-currencies - valor stones (of various types), Tokens (which you use in combination with other items to make Hongmoon Coins?), and I think a few other things which had no use in and of themselves, but were only used to exchange for other items. So they're pseudo-currencies.

To make matters more confusing, these are used blade and soul gold in entirely different locations for different purposes. A few highlights:

I care less about the confusion (though it matters) than the fun. It was not fun to be unable to purchase even a single sticky bun, soup, or healing potion (wrong term, I know) until I had over 5 silver at something like level 10. It would have taken my whole bankroll. Yes, healing wasn't an issue so I didn't need to buy any, but it felt ridiculous that stores were utterly useless.

In general, finding so many things I couldn't buy was just bewildering at first. I need Five THOUSAND red beans to bladeandsoulgolds.net buy "something!?" I don't have ANY. I don't even know how you get them! Why is this store even in the early level area? (Yes, I figured it out over time, but the amount of reading/watching to figure all this out amounted to almost as many hours as I spent playing.