SOrry but thats crap, what you have is, the ability to turn all your settings down if and when you want to raid. Not everyone bothers with raiding, or even likes it. A long time is spent often getting to top level when you are enjoying the world, not enjoying getting the best of the best kit with nothing to use it on at the end. There isn't any reason for a brand new game to look like crap, its pretty much as simple as that. THey don't have to look spectacular, nothing does, but remotely good would be nice. IT has that horrible, overly busy with nothing actually looking very good feel to it.
Really dislike it when games go for quantity of bushes, grass, tree's over quality as it just looks a mess. Most of said tree's, bushes and grass look very very dated, just multiplied. THe character models aren't bad, but aren't great. There really isn't much of a difference between character models despite the massive talking up of the versatility of character creation. The difference between fatest and thinest is very small, tall and short, not a huge difference. Different faces maybe, only a few different haircuts of which 3-4 of the 8 just won't be chosen by anyone.
Horrible level of instancing in at least the early area's(maybe not later content) coupled with insanely, ridiculously, worst I've ever seen loading issues was really not the way to go. The whole UI looks poor, the inventory, quest, skills stuff. I also can't tell but, afaik skills simply automatically come in as you level, I'm not sure if theres any real deviation in characters or if every hunter will be identical to others bar a few skill points added here or there.
Fighting is, as suspected, a good thought, but in reality, more of a pain than other MMO's. Yes they've gotten rid of the click a button see a skill thing , but now we have, hit 1, 2 or 3 thats almost it thing.
Why they supposedly used an old client if theres one with loading times and some graphical stuff fixed i don't know. Theres supposed to be a lot of single player content AFAIK< especially early on yet lots of people are finding their characters very hard to take on groups of guys. One of the night time quests a group of 4 guys I had to kill one and run into a Inn to get away from the rest to take them down one at a time. Sure, you can sneak past everything(just about) but thats just a tad pathetic. AS in, "sure, you can solo, you can just sneak past everything and not actually really do anything, woo" .
The other thing would be, as a hunter, a supposed range class, I have almost no range and have multiple melee attacks already and a single ranged attack, a trap that has so far not worked a single time. Very weak bow powers compared to melee attacks, just seems at least at low level to basically be a melee fighter, it just all seems wrong so far. Meh, we'll see. What was very much most certainly billed as an "open beta" was on the day of release suddenly changed to a "stress test" using an old client with no stability at all. Thats fine, if they said it was such. OPen beta's are often taken as a semi demo. For Lotro the open beta gave an absolutely fantastic indication of how the final game would be, it was in a fantastic, stable, great looking, working, bugless(mostly) state.
Oh well, maybe it will improve a lot, but somehow, I doubt it.