These are just my thoughts, take them or leave them, but please don't be offended!
My favorite D&D builds are the dextrous fighter-esque builds. This led me to create a halfling fighter as my first and only character on FK. Here have been some of my challenges.
Ability scores. I don't like my characters to have debilitating defects, so I generally try not to go below 10 on any stats. That said, I like to play purposed characters that aren't particularly well-rounded. In my mind, this allows for character growth in the weaker areas. I was pretty happy with the scores I chose in character creation, and they didn't seem like min-maxing (though as it turns out, she had max dex). In my character's search for dexterity and feat trainers, she gained a lot of knowledge (especially on religions), so I reflected that in my point placement. She's now a fairly intelligent fighter (enough to use the Expertise feat, which I feel fits with my original vision well.) My difficulty with finding 18+ trainers was stated in the other thread, and was addressed by Raona (Thank you!) I find myself being forced to meta-game though to get to "minimum stat requirements" for certain features that I feel mesh with my character. It's distressing, because this information is not public and difficult to figure out except by potentially debilitating trial and error.
Non-canonical surprises. I don't know what to say about this, other than "gotchas are everywhere and oftentimes completely unexpected". I realize this game is not intended to be 100% canonical Forgotten Realms D&D 3.5. I wanted to have a dual-wielding fighter, but was amazed that this skill isn't obtained until level 30-something, and the two-weapon feats require even more. To exacerbate this, I had no idea what skills are available at what levels until my character joined a guild, which is a permanent choice. I imagine this was done to make things mysterious and murky to new players. What muds these days need to realize is that it's elitist and not newbie-friendly to be purposefully opaque with new character concept creation and design. It disenfranchises new players to make what seem like reasonable decisions, only to find out that they're seemingly arbitrarily not the right ones. Ability score requirements that are completely hidden from the player (e.g. the Gilded Lance advanced Fighter training) seem like they're going to be a sticking point in the future. This makes me sad.
Quests. I like the idea of travelling to a new town and finding quests. However, the quest log is very difficult to read and inconsistent with coloring and placement. Also, some quests are very descriptive about reminding you where you are in the quest. Others are downright perplexing, and when something goes wrong you're essentially hosed. I'm not a completionist by any means, but it's annoying to work for hours on a quest and have it dud out because of some issue that's difficult to troubleshoot. Another complication with quests is that sometimes it's hard to gauge the difficulty level, i.e. there is not enough transparency about whether or not you can actually reasonably do the quest. The areas command is a spamfest that only helps every so often, though it is nice that it's broken down into low-, mid-, and high-level dungeons.
Trainers. This is something original about FK, and I really love the idea that you have to learn feats from NPCs instead of gaining them out of thin air as many DMs do in tabletop. That said, I feel like the placement of trainers is utterly and frustratingly arbitrary and ad hoc. It's one thing to use/wrack your brain and figure out where a trainer might be, employing lore and critical thinking. It's wholly another to have to wander aimlessly hoping to get lucky or to have to beg established players for this knowledge. This is mostly in regards to feat trainers, but also to skill trainers and to a lesser extent 18+ stat trainers (since these are intended to be impossible for new characters to access.) As an example, there is a certain NPC that is clearly supposed to be a dextrous fighter guru and trains improved initiative and lightning reflexes, but not weapon finesse or expertise. Many NPCs don't train anything, when it would make large amounts of sense for them to train something specific (fine, not everybody wants to train you, but this method of design is a conscious choice that is clearly not the motivating factor in many areas.) I seem to recall a "trainer" NPC that doesn't train level. Why...?
Gear size. Out of everything, this has been the most upsetting. Almost all gear from stores is medium sized. This would not be a problem if magical gear could be resized. Fine, you've been playing FK for 10 years and have a ton of glory used and/or your character is high level and doesn't care about spending it with the application process. That's not a typical newbie experience. A typical newbie experience is "Oooh, I finally gathered 90 platinum to by a cool new sword. Ok, let's resize this thing like I have with all my other equipment.... What? I can't? #$@!" For mundane characters, you have no way to definitively tell before purchase whether something is masterwork or magical (also listed as masterwork), i.e. whether it can be resized or not. There are ways to get around this problem (masterwork items are valued less than magical items from the same vendor, magic-users can see enchantments, etc.), but this all seems like a fix for something that shouldn't even be broken.
Gear layers. It seems like a lot of "clothes" items that should either go over armor or under armor are set to regular armor, making them useless for most adventurers.
Vendors. Aside from the masterwork ambiguity mentioned above, the shop listing code could use some serious improvements. For example, buying from multiple merchants in the same room, making examine include the name of the item, having a * or some other identifier in the list command for if the item is masterwork, an "identify" service only for items being sold in the shop, etc.
Thanks!
