The game itself is great. The players can make this game painfully frustrating.
Knight Online does pretty much all of that, and while it doesn't perfect it, KOL is still fun for the price, which is 0 for a basic account. Subscription fees are relatively cheap, unless you're downright greedy (something like $35 a month to get 400% exp). It doesn't give games like World of Warcraft or Age of Conan a run for their money, but the game itself has a notable fun factor to it.
I've also met a few people that were quite nice, and I enjoyed socializing with the decent, more mature gamers in KOL.
So overall, the game of KOL itself is a thumbs up.
It's the player community and the sloppiness that goes into the maintenance of the game that turns many people off and tests other players' patience.
For one, the game is highly populated with bots. Even in video games, people don't want to do anything that resembles work, so why not gather money/exp when you're nowhere near your computer while all those suckers are busy clicking away to level up, right?
It really makes you want to fly to Turkey and backhand every single bot player in the country.
Yes, Turkey. The majority (I could guess 90% and probably be almost on the dot) of the player community is from Turkey. Sorry English speakers, unless you have a character in the relatively new Carnac server (no Turkish players allowed=win), you're practically in a different country, what with the huge language barrier and all.
Another issue: the poor, poor, poor, pooooor maintenance of the game by K2. I'll just name off a bunch of random occurrences that happen on a regular basis.
-Pressing the 'Delete Character' button in the character selection screen only produces a text box saying that the feature to do that is "temporarily unavailable currently". Temporarily? It's been that way for over a year.
-The notorious 99% loading crash that floods the troubleshooting forums; the game is juuuuust about loaded and about to take you to the game itself when you're taken to the exit screen. The game closes, and your browser shows you the goodbye page.
Said page tells you to get gold membership. Judging from the fact that the game probably just crashed for the 3rd try in a row, a gold membership of a game that would probably still crash doesn't sound so great.
-Random disconnects from the server; well, self explanatory.
-COMPLETE AND UTTER DISREGARD FROM K2 FOR THE FACT THAT THERE ARE FIELDS FULL OF BOTS KILLING ALL THE MONSTERS THAT THE HUMAN PLAYERS ARE TRYING TO KILL. Okay that's not a bug, but it's just as frustrating.
Yeah, this review talks a lot about what's bad about KOL, but if you're willing to look past these problems (i.e. your patience level is +100), this game is definitely worth a look.
The gameplay is fun.
The cheaters are stupid.
Stupid cheaters.