I too love the game.
As for character design, well I can't help but critique it, being an artist and illustrator in training with previous focused drawing experience in drawing comic book characters and specifically anatomy studies, I find the lack of customization in character design inadequate in some areas. Why is it that I can enlarge the breast and posterier of say a female character but not change the width of her mouth. Why can I have the ears stick out like dumbo, but not have other features accessible. Why are the male accessories mostly facial growth, and the females have mostly headbands, but I have no individual options to add nose piercings, chains, or other features that might be desired. I know it takes more time to create a more complex customization system, however being that eldar scrolls is primarily a role playing game, and this is their first online endeavor into a larger world, it would have made more sense to give the players deeper customization options to truly create unique looking characters, especially when you consider that their crafting system and class/skill system is based on customization. I also wont touch the hairstyles, cause well, they frankly are terrible. My wife being a stylist, I would expect to see some better and more diversed styles, but it seems all games lack this customization.
my other complaint would have been the lack of instancing in some parts of the quests. When I had to zone into a dungeon under some cemetary, why do i always have to be in their with so many others. This takes away from the immersion when you go dungeon crawling and leave the wider open surface. It was at times annoying to have no mobs to kill in between the entrance and end area, even the mini-bosses guarding something I have to loot at the end. I was also tired of attacking a mob to have the same guy following me attacking the same mob as me instead of going off and getting his own mob. I felt like I was charging forward, yanking a target, iniating combat to have someone else come in and esentially steal the mob. It would have been different if I was grouped up, but I wasn't. I will say, compared to skryim or morrowind or any other Eldar scrolls game, its nice to have people to interact with, but I feel they could have spent more time figuring out when to have other people appear on quests, and when to make it feel like your the only one making a different. At times the amount of overcrowdedness takes away from the Eldar scrolls enjoyment of exploring the world and doing some heroic stuff, because now I feel that its too overcrowded with people which takes away from my feeling of being important or making a difference in the world.
Crafting was good however, I just personally hate the idea of needing a crystal to make stuff. I understand perhaps you need a material to make something to look like another races gear, perhaps instead of a gem, it could have simply been a recipe, but I feel you shouldn't have to invest this extra gold sink to craft your own races look. That should be innate for your race, as you have seen it more often, encountered it and were probably initially trained in crafting it that its almost second nature. I also wish that they had some basic enchantments knowable to start, perhaps the re-enforced armor or something ingrained that you already know for say armor and something for weapons. Crafting is rather slow to start because you are literally making starting gear and then junk thereafter. You have to find items with traits from drops or quests, then break them down for each item to learn to craft that trait. Its a slow time consuming investment which ultimately will pay off in the end, but getting their is slow, really slow when every urn, barrel, or chest is already empty when you get their, or only has food products in it. It would be nice if perhaps you could just fince a recipe to learn or research as drops that might make it easier. Also some of the crafting mats don't seem to drop when you say mine for ore, you get just ore. I only seemed to get the enhancement items from breaking down another item. This in turn means I am having to break down good stuff to get the items I need, or tearing apart junk to get mats that I can't harvest. It might get easier higher up, but to start it is again slow. I spent the entire weekend, on three different characters, and all in all, I think by the end of the weekend from breaking apart stuff, I might have gained 7 honing items at most for armor smith, 1 pitch for woodworking, and 2 of the items for cloth. That is alot of time invested in crafting to make anything, which I guess can be ok, but it is still a little frustrating that it takes so much effor to make anything half descent to start. Then their is that whole gold ratio from buying and selling. I get stuff that I can maybe get 7 gold from at best on a vendor for an item, but they then sell only fine quality junk, and I say junk because its green but it has no traits on them, and they want like 600+. I have issues with eldar scrolls economy in general, it has always been like that, and I can understand that they buy for less than they sell, but thats a huge difference in price, why bother putting vendors in with glorified and expensive junk that you probably wont invest in. Seems like a waste of perfectly good NPCs.
Eitherway, I still enjoyed the game, and can only hope that some of the issues I might have seen at the front bother me less after launch.