During the last few weeks I realized that I no longer have fun with PoW and I'm stuck in some constant struggle with the game. This is new to me - PoW has always had bad an annoying sides but the part which made me keep playing (and even spending some money on the game, which I have never done before on a MMO and will probably never do on another game of this kind) greatly overpowered the flaws. This is no longer the case, it looks like I've reached a point where I'm playing mechanically, following some habit that developed for more than two years with PoW, than to actually enjoy the experience. Many, if not all of the reasons for this are related to the end game and many of them have already been mentioned by other people in other threads. You may agree or disagree with them but either way, that's my stance on the matter:

1. The general hostility of the Blood Gods bracket toward gladiators who are not already there for a long time is a major problem. In all honesty the end game of PoW has never been fair but now this is especially pronounced. A gladiator ascending from Primus doesn't face challenges but nearly impossible fights which become his/her everyday life for months ahead. The Conquests partially rectified the issue with the ridiculously slow gearing speed but didn't resolve it for two main reasons - due to the randomness of the Conquest drops and due to the unavailability of orange weapons in that mode. With daily dungeon runs, your fighter will still need two months on the average to find adequate armour pieces. That is of course much better than the... about an year needed to gather similar equipment before the Conquests but it still renders your fighter a punchbag in the meantime. That's the (much) smaller problem however.

2. The bigger one is with the rating requirements for orange gear from the blacksmith and especially the weapons. I honestly have no reasonable explanation for its existence apart from an ad hoc "motivation" to spend money on trophies to boost your fighter so he/she can reach the rating necessary for some orange piece faster. It's a barrier for all new entrees in Blood Gods and is probably one of the reasons why the vast majority of the gladiators in the bracket belong to one and the same old-schoolers and new managers enter and stay in Blood Gods for more than a month very rarely. And of course - it totally sucks to spend two months in an attempt to reach the necessary rating and ultimately fail for whatever reason. I'm in such situation for the second time with Vaargus at the moment. Last month he needed 50 more rating points to buy an orange weapon. This month he was going well but during the last couple of days he lost 15-16 out of 20 battles for all sorts of reasons and now he has to win enough fights to get more than 300 points for one week, which is very unlikely to happen. So another season wasted. I'm fine with patience, as long as it doesn't become the sole purpose of a game. Patience without fun is not what I'm looking for in a product which is supposed to be entertaining.

3. Then comes the randomness. "X screams as he gets knocked to the ground by the massive shot". "X can't find an opening to stand". I'm really sick of the knockdown criticals and I've mentioned the reasons for this many times in many threads so I'm not going to repeat them. It's not only them though. You don't have much control over the environment in Blood Gods. You fight everyone and everyone fights you so your win rate depends on what types of gladiators are there in the bracket and how many of them can be countered by your build. Even then however the constant stream of knockdowns, injuries, knockouts, random negative events like your gladiator throwing away his weapon and whatnot can make a mockery of your planning and strategy. These would be acceptable if they didn't happen multiple times every single day, sometimes every single fight. The only effective way to partially control them is either to pick a super-fast, hard-hitting build (something Elaar/Dunder something), or to pick a super-defensive build (something Spite/Trug something) so you can either spam the nasty things yourself or negate them as much as possible. Otherwise you find yourself in a situation where you've spend months on some fighter only to find out that you can't make him/her useful in the end game no matter what you do.

4. And of course, the balance. I partially mentioned in the the upper point but it needs its own place. The game DOES have a lot of balance issues with skills, races, builds and whatnot but that becomes a real problem when you reach Blood Gods. Then it turns out that some race/specialty/skill combinations are completely impotent in that bracket and you have to either rebuild them from the ground up, essentially turning them into completely different fighters, or just discard the months that you have spent on them and retire them. I'm not talking about problems that can be caused by your bad decisions - they would be entirely your fault - but about problems caused by design issues. Like picking War Cry, without knowing how useless it is and going further down the War tree, so the retrain becomes painful as hell. Or like picking a race which just doesn't have the "right" bonuses for Blood Gods, like Human for instance. The game really needs more frequent balance passes.

This is getting a very long post already so to conclude it - I think that PoW has a great core gameplay and potential to expand into many areas. It is the best MMO that I've played (not that I've played many) and one of the best games for me in general. But the frustration from playing it exceeds the fun for some time. That said, it will be good to know how many of the issues mentioned above are acknowledged as such and if there are any plans to fix them in the near future. Based on that, I'll either quit or continue playing.