I left because of the reluctance to make more items for the game. For some reason, it was "bad" to create armor and different weapons. Everyone would have this locked up view of: This is not World of Warcraft. Go home. But everyone failed to realize that people play for the sake of accomplishment and the feeling of finishing something. That is why WoW is so popular and using it as a role model does not lower your reputation at all, but rather can make you into a more successful game developer. That's why everyone stuck around when log challenge was introduced and all of those dungeons were actually "fun" and challenging to run. The game started to fail as new things to accomplish started to diminish and for some reason, there was a reluctance to create new in game items when one would assume those are the simplest to create (before a male model). Crafting came in, but some people would rather have simplicity such as destroying a boss for a certain weapon and or unique armor piece. Everyone was too caught up in trying to make something super original when they forgot that everything has some sort of basis. Everyone has this unrealistic idea of making something brand new and creative. Yes, things come out that are very creative and do make it but those are usually products that are created by hugely funded companies or led by professional game developers. It seemed as though the direction of AoT was headed towards a: Use things from games that are already out there that are extremely common for a game but claim that the game which will be developed will be something completely creative and new. That doesn't make sense? Everyone felt the need to uphold a pride that never existed which was to make this game overly original and not make it just like an average: MMORPG or CORPG if you may call it. They wanted to stray from a genre and create their own. This inevitably drove the game to more doom and gave it more fault than fortune. Some people have to realize that creating a game is not only based off of making something brand new and creative that no one has ever thought up before, but they have to realize that some people still play games that are already made off of a non-creative framework. What you have to think is that you can use a framework that everyone already enjoys and is proven to enjoy but make the contents and the structure that surrounds the framework creative, new and appealing. Age of Time wanted to create a framework of its own without a real team working at it. Personally thats why I left, I didn't like the attitude and the odd invulnerability to 'old ideas that work' and the fact that no one EVER made effort to create something such as a group system that would allow players to more easily play TOGETHER as this is a multi-player game. Some people enjoy more PvE aspects with others than a PvP aspect in which most other successful independent and mainstream games have taken into account.
For some reason I find that this could have been evaded so easily but it seems as though the mind(s) behind this game were forcing it into hell. They had so many options and so many other paths which could have made the game 100x more interesting but they didn't take them and thought that they could just wing it. Whether or not the development team felt this way is not the point, it's the fact that the actions taken had spoken louder than thoughts and words and realistically most people judge things off of what happens and not what was planned and didn't happen.
It seems as though the game was headed to a community based driven game, as economy etc was made by the community and so were clans (even if a clan system wasn't introduced). For some reason though, all fan created items were never implemented into the game nor at least duplicated even if it would have made the game better and would have SURELY (and I repeat surely) would have made the game more successful. What bothers me most is the fact that the developer(s) wouldn't even have to do any work either. But I guess doing NO work, is TOO much work? Ironic.