AoC had my attention for a while, until I joined a gaming group that's waiting for it and discovered the previous leader of the most RMT-heavy guild on my old Archeage server is the creative director of the game. I find it hard to trust that someone who would spend tens of thousands of dollars to get ahead in an MMO will create a game that doesn't allow shortcutting via RMT in some fashion or another. I may wind up making an account for it anyway to see what the play experience is like (call me masochistic, I did the same thing in Bless Online/AA:U despite knowing better), but I expect it's going to go the same way everything before it has.
I've been regularly looking through what we have coming out over the last year or so, and it's a pretty bleak outlook. Nobody's really doing anything innovative, or even interesting. The consistent lack of evolution in this genre's getting depressing. I honestly think that even if CoE flops somehow, it's still going to have a pretty big playerbase simply because it's different.
