This game’s honing system is a casino where you either gamble with large amount of your own time or large amounts of your own money, eventually at stupid low odds.
While it has very good gameplay, classes are very well designed, graphics are great for an MMO, there are a lot things to plan out and think through. At the end of the day you eventually reach a point where your main measure of progression is gated behind luck, and to beat that luck you swipe or become a slave, doing the same shit over and over for a “tap”, mere chance of progression.
You could argue that this is an MMO, and in mmos you gotta grind… but this isn’t really the experience I had playing other MMOs (I was pretty hardcore on Aion back in the day), where you’d grind for a specific, finite amount of time, enjoy endgame, and when the new update comes out - rinse, repeat, this game is more like if a Gacha and a korean MMO made a baby and that’s just evil 
It’s honestly kinda sad with how great many parts of this game are that they chose to go this way instead of monetizing cosmetics harder.
And I can’t see the current form of this game being popular or sustainable long term, I guess time will tell… but as I see it you need to either be streamer/give up having a real life, unhealthy and a little masochistic/have a ton of money to the point where you don’t care about spending a shit ton on a game.
We will either see player counts dropping or the game changing drastically in the amount of things it lets you do to get mats and up the honing rates <— which does seem to be the trend in other versions. So basically… why would I spend my time on this poop honing now while AGS just seems to be testing the limits of how much they can milk out of whales before progression will just be easier and take less time?
I’d rather watch this thing roll out and consider playing again after they change the game rather than spend 1000 hours to fight the last phase of the latest sparkly goat with unexplained weather periods after I’ve eventually won the honing lottery, or irl lottery.