Honestly, the dev is in way over his head trying to make an MMO without having the resources nor foresight to think through a lot of necessary design decisions that come with a game being an MMO and this game has quickly fallen out of my daily gaming rotation.
The biggest issue, which other reviews have talked about, is the bot problem. In any MMO you are inevitably going to encounter a botting problem. Unfortunately the dev has taken the bizarre approach to make regular play more oppressive and annoying on regular players while the bots continue botting. The anti-bot systems have gotten more heavy-handed week after week since release and it's just not fun anymore as a regular player.
The second biggest issue which compounds the first is a lack of proper economy design. It's a grindy MMO. It attracts bots. Therefor inflation is going to run rampant without enough proper gold sinks. And this game has zero meaningful gold sinks. The further from release a new player starts playing, the worse their experience is going to be trying to join the game's economy.
Lastly, the devs and mods do absolutely jack all for communicating with the playerbase. Yes we get patch notes, but half the changes come out of left field are often left out of the patch notes. Dev has a tendency to solely cater fixes towards combat grinders and completely ignores requests from gatherers and crafters. On top of that, there's no communication on support tickets, bug threads, or feedback threads. Reporting botters is just met with silence until your support ticket is closed due to no response after a week. Even when the dev is present in Discord, usually just making jokes and poking fun at players, they refuse to answer direct questions.
I applaud the dev for introducing a new indie MMO to the market and I thought this was going to go better than it did, but unfortunately the dev needs a proper team and proper communication. I don't see this game actually surviving long-term without it and just know that joining the game will grow worse as it goes on without any fixes to the above.
