A friend of mine preordered this for me as a Birthday present. Kind gesture, seeing as he spent 40 bucks, but the time I spent playing the beta test was pretty crappy.
99% of the userbase that I met were just running around exploiting whatever glitches or exploits they could find in order to kill people (especially newbies) and it was extremely difficult to get in and actually TEST anything. I think I died about 20 times before I even figured out how to put on pants, and I never had a chance to really try out the crafting system other than the few hours on the day of every patch (while people were still busy macroing). You had to spend ages to get up to the point that you could somewhat defend yourself, and it wiped constantly - so it was basically ruled by people who played 24/7 and would just macro for 2 days after every wipe. Logging in after a wipe would find a few hundred people macro beating on NPCs for weapon skill, then as soon as they skilled up they'd go and make themself the flavor of the week weapon that did too much damage for some reason or other and hadn't been fixed yet. At one time it was magic, which was added in a buggy state and waaay overpowered and required no reagents - people macroed it endlessly then ran around slaughtering everyone in town who started a bit late and hadn't had a chance to build up yet.
Have they fixed the town guard system yet? Last I saw the guards were killing the player who called them as much as the player they were calling them on.