It is a welcome break from R99. It's not classic and doesn't pretend to be. You spawn with gear when you die in PVP so generally people actually fight and either win/lose. You can control cities and give guards items to buff you or port you, etc - minimizing a lot of the prebuffing/porting around nonsense. Raids are 10-12 characters so 5-6 people 2 boxing. A lot of the qualify of life things added post classic era are in like shared bank, /corpsedrag, keyrings, etc. A lot of the huge timesinks such as camping key mobs or farming gear in general have been tuned to not be nearly as bad. Manastones work everywhere. There are raid mobs up 24/7 worth killing.
Most importantly, there are PVP merchants everywhere where you can buy gear like AONs, guises, ancient spells, and some cool unique items. The server encourages PVP and doesn't punish you for losing aside from the bragging rights and a trip (with gear) to your bind. There is also a working in-game leaderboard.
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