It's like Poker at a casino. The House is always taking their rake, but you can generate profit exploiting the other players inefficiencies. Only Min-Maxers will survive. To anyone else, it will feel like a scam. This isn't a game for the weekend, it's been around 20+ years. There's a reason it's still here. The economy is incredibly robust as everyone works their niche. It will not be so easy to find your own. There's a real lack of available information here, because knowledge is money. You won't find any guides to follow that bring you any edges. Any information that's out there is going to be outdated or over used. But, that also makes this game one of the more exciting MMORPGs to explore and uncover, as there are many many secrets out in this world, and the player community is very strong.

This is a very very very good modern MMO that finally doesn't just follow the textbook WoW type MMO. While I enjoy this game greatly, I don't feel the need to overwhelm any readers with all sorts of mechanics. Instead I just want to mention what's good about it.
- Levels matter, but end game is not gate-kept by the need to be Max Level, levels overall make the equipment you wear more powerful. But the equipment itself is already powerful. This brings great benefit and reward to long term players that invest in their character. They will have a not-so-not-significant edge when fighting. Levels very much help, but strategy and skill trumps it.
- You are what you wear. You do not need to reroll a char every time you want to try something fresh, your single one character can become max level at everything. The skills are on the equipment, meaning you can swap out all sorts of things for different loadouts. Imagine an Assassin, wearing a plate helmet, cloth chest, and leather boots. This is what you can expect to find in Albion, where you're tweaking your character around the skills the gear offers.
- Combat is modern MOBA style. This is great. I love games like Dota but hated the toxic community. Albion let's me invest time into raising my own MOBA hero, and then offers TONS of different ways to engage in PVP combat. One of my personal favs, for the most part, PVP is drop all loot on kill. This makes it incredibly rewarding, and risky, and gives you a rush you can't find anywhere else.
- There's no quests. This doesn't bode well for some people that require direction. But if you're a self goal setting oriented player, you'll find the most amount of player agency you can find currently in an online RPG. This also means that you're not screwed out of content because you didn't complete a quest.

The only bad thing about this game is that it's a single server. It's powerful, it runs great for me. But I live very nearby to it. Players in Europe and Australia will suffer high pings that cripple active action sequences for them. Hopefully SBI finds some kind of solution for this in the future.

I recommend you definitely give it a shot, and try to play a bit longer than the first time you get lost. There's a lot to uncover here, and if you neglect to invest a bit of time, you'll find that you passed up one of the greatest competitive MMORPGs.