Although it took them almost 5 days to fix the crash - at least its done. The latest patch has cleared majority of users from the annoying memory leak that made many aspects of the game unplayable (notably instances and astral). Even I got a taste of it - ran tt2 with a few new 40s and we wiped on a boss soley due to the fact that all 3 40s managed to crash during a boss encounter. That aside, I can't imagine doing tt2 with a legit group of 35s, it seems quite difficult.

There has been no word on whether or not fixes will go out to heroics and astral. From what I've read and heard ingame, new 40s will have an extremely hard time completing heroics because of aggro issues - it seems like aggro ranges have increased significantly along the 20% damage increase. As we all know, psi's spectral assassin has been nerfed for bosses so I'm a bit bummed since I'll be fairly useless dps-wise on red rings. As for astral, the drop decrease seems a bit dramatic... I will agree that previously it sounded way too easy, but now it seems like they went overboard with nerfs.

As much as I am all for "challenging" in a game, anything extremely time consuming that provides little rewards goes opposite of that belief. There is a difference between wasting time because the game mechanics said so, and wasting time because people in your group just don't know how to play. People should be able to finish heroics in a timely manner without needing to be already in epic gear... it kind of defeats the purpose of progression. I would say that a geared group should be able to clear all heroics for the day given 5 hours. Since this game does not have that many heroics yet, and 5 hours is quite a span of time, I think it's a good goal to shoot for. If it is taking people longer than this to clear, then something is wrong. (We aren't even counting the hours they need to do dailies + farm money + whatever)

I'm not far from 39, but I will probably get to 40 just doing my dailies every day... more or less postponing 40.

There is a thread on the forums asking about the possibility of including battlegrounds or arenas in Allods. The replies are fairly interesting, some people agree and others disagree. It seems like most players who are against it believe that battlegrounds/arenas will kill world pvp, while the opposing side thinks organized pvp is a great way of obtaining the currently almost-impossible at 40: the Judge/Juggernaut rank. This rank unlocks the special third ruby, one of the very last ruby for any player to get.