I actually quit this game over money, the amount needed was just too much trouble to be fun any longer especially since I didn't find the combat to be all that satisfying.

If you do not enjoy work orders you are closed off from making it in meaningful amounts, all other avenues have been systematically eliminated. Personally I hated work orders because crafting any simple item is a mess of you need these 6 items, which also have to be individually crafted ...some of the sub-components need to be crafted, and then some of the sub components of those sub components also need to be individually crafted. Some people enjoy that sort of thing but not everyone is going to. The main draw of this game is that you can do so many things, but if there is only ONE way to make the money to afford doing all these fun things, and you don't enjoy it ...you are fucked.

It actually gets worse if you are trying to level up a skill such as augmentation because you must choose weather to sell your gear for money or disassemble it for experience. Oh you need both? have fun buddy.

When I heard that favor would eventually be reset it was basically the last straw for me, since I enjoyed giving gifts for favor exactly ....zero amounts. You know what made that suck less though? ( and also eliminated the problem of you must use X skill to beat Y dungeon - you know like ghost war caches ) was belts that determined what gear types would drop for you, because then you could continue to progress the skills you wanted and enjoy the game even if it meant temporarily switching to something you didn't want to actually use, but nope... fun is not allowed.

If money was less of a huge barrier to unlocking combat skills this game would have remained fun for a much longer amount of time, there are tons and tons of skills I still wanted to play with but the prohibitive costs, again, made it no longer worth the effort. This was especially bad for me because I have no way of knowing if skill A+B would even be viable after all that effort, and after years of doing it anyways I decided enough was enough. I stuck with it as long as I could, because the game has some really cool ideas and I still think Citan is a cool ass dude as far as game developers go. ( plus the community, you guys are awesome for the most part.)

You may not agree with what I or the OP are saying here, but they are valid complaints. Try to especially look at this from the perspective of a person who is actually new to the game, being able to do work orders require huge amounts of storage. Most of the people saying just do work orders, have several tradeskill mules+ their associated storage just to make that viable, it's a bit hypocritical. ( especially since in most cases this was built on the back of other alternate forms of money making that used to but no longer exist. )

How much grinding is acceptable just to be able to do the one thing you actually wanted to do? Way less then the game forces you into. Currently you have to grind money for several tradeskills so you can grind the favor to unlock the trainers, then grind more money to pay those trainers, and then you can -finally- start grinding the skill you actually wanted to play with and maybe have some fun.

This was a problem for me and I had been playing since I dunno, 2014? So I can sort of put myself into a new players shoes and see how it would be much, much worse for them.