A friend of mine (whom I've been trying to bully into playing ESO) got invited to the ArcheAge Alpha. Here's what he says about it:

Lloyde wrote:

That and I've been having a go with the ArcheAge Alpha.

It's... alright. My main annoyance are the quests. There are a lot of them but they are your standard, "Go here and kill 10,000 of [mob_name]. Now go and talk to [npc_name]. Now go and pick 500,000 flowers." And the font is big so it makes reading the text quest pretty uninteresting. At least for me xD. The leveling feels semi-slow. There are a lot of quests, but it feels like most of them don't give enough xp. Then again, you can Overachieve (or underachieve if you really hate a quest haha) for a bit more xp.

Hmmm...I've not done much crafting but what little I have done (I've only crafted paper and sheet music so that I can compose xD)... it seems like they're really expecting you to get into it and spend a lot of time with it. Some of the requirements are ridiculous and unrealistic!

​Like for sheet music, one of the ingredients is some stuff you get from fish. In order to get it you need to extract what one would think is the tiniest drop ever from 100 fish. 100. In order to make one (1) sheet of music paper you need 10 pieces of normal paper... Really!? I don't really know if here are other things that are that absurd but I don't doubt it. Some of the times for growing and raising stuff is crazy, too. But I guess it's not too bad. Some trees take two days to grow to a point where they can be cut down for lumber. Maybe that's not so bad, but it does take a while and make one impatient. Especially if most or all one plans on doing is planting, raising, and harvesting. I heard it's possible to level off of nothing but that, but it takes a while.

Hmmm... Ah, the classes I chose are Sorcery, Witchcraft, and Occultism to create the Masterclass Demonstration. ​The magic in this game is... alright. My biggest pet peeve is that you can't move while casting. Ever since GW2, I can't stand not being able to move while casting spells xD. I must admit that I've not tried out any other builds xD.

Then there's the open world pvp. Don't even get me started on that xD. It's a rape-fest most times. I don't like PvP in the first place, so imagine how I feel about open world PvP xD
Anyway, it's not a horrible game. The main thing keeping me playing it is I enjoy having something to do when I feel like being lazy and I like the Guild I'm in... for the most part xD. There's also someone in the guild I've developed a liking for but nevermind that

Sounds mediocre so far and I'm pretty sure he's breaking some kind of NDA agreement by telling me that, but I DIDN'T SIGN AN AGREEMENT. Of course it's just in alpha, so who knows what changes we'll see. ESO looked pretty crap in Alpha too.

I haven't heard anything about this one but it sounds kind of interesting. Open world pvp and not being able to move while casting are probably dealbreakers though.
I want to make sheet music though! Is it like LOTRO where you can play intruments/form bands?