[Vexx]

My assessment so far:

So far Vindictus makes a fair "spare time when your favorite MMO is down" playground. They've got some serious 'not ready for prime time' issues to solve before I'd recommend it as a primary MMO. The clever thing about the game is using player computers to host dungeon instances... but this is also its 'lag' problem. Korea is small and highly connected, the US/Canada is a sprawling mess with large variation in connectivity.

A second problem is the cash shop. Compared with other MMO cash shops they have a pretty unreasonable notion of pricing. Temp haircut and temp underarmor cost real money and only last 30 days. If you run two characters you're going to spend more than you would subscribing to a full-featured pay-to-play MMO. If you don't buy the temp underarmor many of the outfits look dorky because your flannel PJs stick out (which counteracts much of the visual appeal). Secondarily... you've spent $5-$10 on a haircut per month per character that you can only see in town, there's no "in dungeon hide helmet" mode. You're only in town to refit/craft or turn in quests, in other words as briefly as possible.

So for the present, I'm just not spending a dime -- they might get to see some money if they offer permanent hair/undies. The items improve your luck factor and defense.

The communication with the user base is also a mess - even for an export F2P MMO. Nexon is making Aeria and gpotato look positively stellar at the moment here. Anecdotally, I've gotten responses to both Aeria and gpotato tickets within 24 hrs every time. Nada from Nexon. I feel sorry for the Nexon forum moderator (one sole moderator as far as I can tell), she's basically thrown to the wolves with apparently no way to get answers herself.

I'm definitely having fun with it... but I'd recommend wariness in spending money on it for the time being. If they happen to change any of the sources of my complaints, I'll post accordingly.