I played a little bit of AoC (just got into multiplayer portion), and I'm going to uninstall it today. The game's user interface is absolutely atrocious, the people don't fit in with scenery and the spells don't fit in with people.
Even the spell charge bar is TEXTURED like a goddamn carpet. It's not clean-looking. Nothing is. They textured it because they COULD. Everything important looks indistinctive, everything unimportant screams for your attention.
Everyone runs around with stock 3D studio 3d arrows rotating around them, the minions look weak and ugly, talent screen has no permanent text labels, and despite the character customization, something about the renderer ensures that you never get close enough for long enough to someone else to see how they're different and unique, so in the end, everyone really looks the same.
They learned ZERO from LOTRO and Hellgate London. Just like LOTRO its hard to tell NPCs from players at a glance, for instance, and just like Hellgate, the talent screen and inventory are a mess.
It's not something that can be fixed with patches. It's a sum of all decisions that were put into the game over its 5-year development cycle, and it's spread into the quests, the renderer, everything.
For another glimpse at this idiocy - during the character creation, you have to select from several voices. They all sound like the same guy yelling different things. How are you supposed to compare if they're all completely different... yet the same ?
It's the game I would've designed if I was 16 years old and did not listen to feedback from anyone else.
The melee 3-directional gimmick is just a gimmick, IMO. In the end, I suspect WoW's level-capped warrior is more strategic and fun than AoC's equivalent at its level cap.