Clearly, YMMV, and that's cool, but I tried Archeage and I left without ever paying because:
The narrative bored me. I didn't feel compelled by the story at all and I didn't relate to any of the characters. Plus, it told it's story in shot cut-scenes that interrupted gameplay, but what I want is to have the story told to me while we play. . . have the NPC come along with me and show me the way to the quest while talking about it and reacting to the battles, etc. - don't stop gameplay for me to watch a minute-long interaction. . . or do, but if that is going to happen, then it should be a really interesting, world-defining quest that is important to the game's narrative. . . not just some guy who wants me to pull up onions for him from local wild onion crafting nodes.
It had a lot of tutorials for crafting and even player-homes. I know some players enjoy these features but I played SWG and they bore me to tears. A deep crafting game is great, but it should have an easy-to-use auction house that allows non-crafters to provide income to the crafters by buying their products and I remember the auction house either being off-limits to F2P or difficult to use. Either way, this is a bad idea as easy point-of-sale is a big deal to those of us who don't enjoy crafting.
The combat was designed to give players a lot of freedom to multi-class, but the result was needing to use tons of keys to map to various powers at higher levels. I want to fight skillfully with about 8-9 powers that can be mapped to 1-5 and e, f, g, and t (q is for a fast-travel power/dodge, while "r" is for auto-run, and I prefer to only have 8 powers so that I can make "g" for mounting but I can live without that if I must). Any other powers should be passives or choices for different builds that replace the other existing powers. Archeage late-game builds will often use 3 full bars of powers. . . like over 20 powers. I found this daunting and thus never invested much time into the game because I felt like I was always headed towards disliking the game.