Problem: Acquiring skills is very slow.
Your Solution: Exp-boosters in Cash-shop!
Real Solution: Put in the time...or if you have a job increase the rate at which you gain XP for just one hour. Which means that you are still behind the kids that spend 8 hours a day playing. Let me break it down for you. A pennyless individual buys the game for 35 dollars. Gets two toons on the main land and levels for 8 hours a day at standard XP gain, he has netted 8 hours of XP in his job and or skills. A hard working with a job and career gets off work and wants to power level spends said hard working dollars and gets Power hour, spend two hours playing with one hour on double XP boost. He has now netted three hours of XP. Still behind the Guy that played more.

Problem:: The skill-cap is restricting my gameplay and making us not competitive in a PVP surrounding.
Your Solution: Buy more characters!
Real Solution: Get with a Group or Community, this is a community game and never intended for solo play...hince the XP cap...hince all of the advertising and focus on guild and community.

Problem: The start is wasting hours of my lifetime.
Your Solution: Equipment in cash-shop!
Real Solution: If You thinking starting is hard you cannot even imagine leveling those T3 Skills. Those 4$ packs of tools are targeted towards people with very small guilds that want to boost their start in the world...but save very....very...very little time.

Problem: I lose a lot of skill-points when I die.
Your Solution: Skill-loss-protection in cash-shop!
Real Solution: Pray and increase your alignment

Problem: I lose more skill-points on death when I kill a lot of players because my alignment is low.
Your Solution: More expensive Skill-loss-protection in cash-shop!
Real Solution: Stop Killing Neutrals, join a real guild and declare war on your enemies so you dont lose alignment and you can kill and maim all day long.

Problem: Life is Feudal: Your Own backers during Early Access were promised "Beta-access" but we dont have the server capacities for all of them yet.
Your Solution: Oh boy! We have an artifically created short supply here!
Let them pay 60$ for beta-access instead of giving out a limited amount of free beta-keys like every normal developer!
Real Solution: How dare they get more backers then they could have ever imagined! They were all going to be allowed in at early access. However the most hard core of people that really love the game were able to pay to get to the front of the line...Shame on them for making money and acting like a business instead of a charity...shame on them. HAHHAHAHA

Problem: I want to delete my character and make a new one!
Your Solution: Pay 10$!
Real Solution: Don't put yourself in a sitution where you have pissed everyone off and you have to start a new character. This is not rust...if you piss everyone off and you have gone -50 alignment you will deal with the consequences.


Problem: They made a new vanilla server and the vanilla server I joined earlier is now a super hardcore PVP server.
My whole guild now needs to be online at the same time 4x in the week for two hours instead of 1x time a week.
We would have to give up our jobs and Real-Life to be able to defend our castle now! We didnt ask for this!
Your Solution: We could give you a free transfer to the new server or...
Pay 10$ in order to make a new character on the server you already paid for!

Real Solution: If you dont like changing mechanics and rulesets, dont join a game when its in early development. You are here to test the game and let the devs know what you think and are able to give your input on what would make it better. They are not here to cater to your every whimsical idea and dream. Play the game and give input, stop QQing and be happy they released early. However stop complaining when they change things....early access and all that.

Conclusion: If you are looking for actual information about the balancing of the game or are at all curious what the real gameplay is like stop by twitch.tv/masterofpwnage2 nightly and we will discuss the true pros and cons of the game.
---------------------------
Update:
We got a response from Mercy:

Like some other people who are very defensive of the game you missed the points completely.

Gamemechanics are jeopardized into cash-grabs and create a conflict of interests on the developers end.

Skill-cap was indeed meant to force players to group up as everyone was specialized into 1 or 2 things.
This is jeopardized into a cash-grab as you can simply dodge it by paying for multiple characters.

Same goes for the alignment system.

Taking payments for permanent items in an Early Access game is rarely done because every normal developer respects their paying customer.
If they do take money and the permanent things are suddenly changed too drastically or removed,
there will be a reimbursement on the developers end.

Except for greed there was no reason whatsoever for not giving out ticket reimbursements.

If you want more information on the game, don't go to that guy. Watch some videos on Youtube.
"First impressions" or something.

My Response:
I have missed nothing, not a single game mechinic is jeopardized. Buying tools has no long term viability and are not permanent items, buying Skill Drop Insurance has no long term viability, nor have the mechanics changed at all that would effect anything that can be purchased in such a manner.

The only thing that has changed is the mechanics of the server, how many characters did you create that you are so negatively effected by a change in mechanics? PM me your paypal information and I will send you the money to move to another server.

The alignment system would not make any lick of sense if it was tied to an account so a per player alignment system makes sense. Assuming you spent 100$ on 10 Characters this is still the cheapest MMO to come out in years.

And please, show me an early access game that doesn't charge for early access or that does not sell items before release. I am sure there are a few, but none of them with a viable long term business model.

What you call greed, is really business. The developers did not make the game out of the kindness of their hearts my friend, they made it because they thought it would make money. Dont forget to send me your paypal so I can send you the money for you toons.

I would also like to note that a change in game mechanics did effect me in the past. You know what I did, I contacted the developers because I needed my guild and myself to move from EU to NA once they announced the times that the judgement hours would be. They helped me in a huge way with the cost of moving my entire guild, what have you done?

Initial Review by ';..;':
!!!Warning, long-ish review ahead!!! (TL;DR at the bottom)
Oh no, a negative review on day one. How could this happen? Well, this isn’t actually day one. Life is Feudal MMO Open Beta tests have been open to certain people for about 2 months, and Life is Feudal YO (the “standalone” game that just ended up being a way for the devs to fund the MMO as well as test certain mechanics) has been up for around 3 years now. I personally bought YO on the first day it came out on steam, but there are people in this community that have been testing and supporting this game even longer.

I have some regrets about posting this review, because I have more hours in LiF YO than any other game, and YO happens to be the game where I have had most of my best gaming moments. This game has a great concept and solid basic structure, and could easily be the best MMO I have ever played if they hadn’t made so many mistakes along the way. Of all the medieval games I have ever played, this game has (in my opinion) the best skill based melee combat of any medieval game (I have played M&B and chiv, and LiF has more than them mechanics wise), especially when it comes to group fights. However, the combat and PvP in general have always had massive flaws in both class balance and functionality (lag, crashes, IBs not working), although the class balance is slowly getting better (emphasis on slowly). PvP functionality, however, is only getting worse. The instanced battles, which are 100v100 battles that can damage an enemy’s realm and eventually let you take them over if you win and siege them, are currently broken and work 1/10 of the time, and the instanced sieges are not in the game. During the closed beta, instanced battles worked more often than they do now. Judgement hour, which is the only time you can get over someone’s walls, often results in the servers either crashing or having unplayable ping, which negates the point of it completely. A lot of people get very competitive in LiF because of the player skill based mechanics and the risk of losing everything you own, but due to most forms of PvP not working, all a group can do is taunt another group in the official discord. If you ever beat a group while you are roaming in the MMO, don’t expect them to ever fight you again if they can help it as their walls will protect them for as long as sieges aren’t in the game. The game currently lacks long term risk, everything anyone builds at the moment can be rebuilt fairly easily if your group has the resources. Nothing is really permanent.

PvP is the only true end game for LiF, and they have made it nearly impossible to do. Sure, you can go around roaming trying to catch people outside their base, but if you want an actual fight outside of the instanced battles, expect the odds to be heavily against you. There is no PvE content here, people call crafting PvE, but PvE implies you will be fighting against an NPC. Crafting is required for PvP in this game, so it might as well be looped into PvP. The animals in this game are mostly for crafting purposes, and there is no threat out in the world other than people and bad server performance (and the occasional bugged out bear/wolf). There are no dungeons in this game, no dragons, no monsters, but evil tribal NPCs are planned. However, I wouldn’t expect these NPCs to be much of a threat if the have the same path finding as animals currently do in the game, getting stuck on objects or just bugging out completely and becoming immortal. Role play is a thing that a lot of players try to do, however, there are little to no mechanics in the game that actually support role playing (which is fine imo) so most role players make up their own roles and it's just a cluster of people’s mismatched stories, worse than a twilight fanfic. The term role play in this game doesn’t really have a meaning anymore, and most people just use it to describe people who don’t PvP (again, because the only real mechanic in this game is PvP at the time being).

As far as in game economy goes, there is none. All currency is used for right now is supporting claims. Regional resources, which was the devs idea to make people trade across the map, usually just turns into people setting up camps in those other zones to get the resources they want. Anything a guy in the southwest region of the map can make, someone in the northeast can make as well. There is no real economy, and no way to damage an enemies economy once they have their resources locked down. Don’t expect to play as a trader, because major alliances can do whatever you think you can do as a small trading group 10x faster than you can.

TL;DR, the main draw of this game, PvP, is not represented well enough. You cannot play this game with the expectation of good, daily PvP, in its current state it simply will not happen. The game is plagued with bad servers, long downtimes, terrible ping, imbalanced weapons and classes, and downright disfunctional or unimplemented NECESSARY mechanics. Give it another 2 years before it is enjoyable as an MMO, because currently the grind feels more like a job with no reward at the end than a game, which is not how a game should feel. I can go on and on about what is wrong with this game but it would probably be pointless since this review will most likely eventually get deleted anyways. Don’t get me wrong, YO is my favorite game of all time, but the devs have made way too many mistakes to salvage this great concept. I expect if this game doesn’t make it that this will be the end of the potentially greatest game genre ever.

And yes, I did download the steam version of the MMO just to write this review.

Disrespectfully,

The most jaded person in all of LiF

My Response:
This is the first negative review that I have read to date. There is no real complaining about mechanics, just a well thought out idea of how the game is broken right now. I agree with everything stated here about PVP. The developers are working very hard to bring the server stability up. The PVP itself is fantastic, the sever stability has improved since the MMO launched a few months ago and is only increasing. Stability however is a very large problem at the time, the PVP however is great when it does work properly.

I do however disagree with the trading thing. My guild relies heavily on trade as does my entire alliance. The introduction of regional goods was a fantastic idea by the developers to increase trading across the server and to make it nearly impossible for a large guild to turtle up and not communicate with the outside world. The economy is entirely player driven, and as the game is still only two months old it is still very, very young. The trade houses (Markets) are still very rough around the edges and I think with a little work by the devs the economy will start to really bustle. However, like I said previously, the current focus of the devs right now is to focus on server stability as that is the number one concern of everyone.

Thanks you ';..;' for the well thought out opinion. Let me know if you have a response to what I have said I would love to discuss this with you in more detail.