tbh I'm not all too excited about the gunner update, I think the dev team could probably find something else more worthwhile to put their time and energy into. I am however looking forward to how the update will change up gameplay and party dynamics. If guns become a more balanced and viable option, more people will become gunners, and this could be cool in terms of the structure of a party and how you play.

I personally think that they sort of ruined the whole idea of the arcade and the concept of exploration and discovery. When I first came to sk the idea of exploring into the unknown of the clockworks and being able to control the levels of the gates through mineral deposits was very attractive and it set apart this game from the other generic mmo's. But they've basically killed these two things firstly by introducing missions which basically hold your hand all the way until end game and render 'adventuring' sort of redundant; it's much easier and faster to simply grind through the missions to get freebies and gear. All exploration and simple 'arcade runs' are mostly left until end game when people get bored of repeating missions and grinding fsc. They also of course removed the mineral depositing system which was one of the main selling points of the game when I saw it. And what is even the point of having bosses in the normal clockworks apart from missions?

Battle sprites was great new content and all but in terms of gameplay I think I could definitely live without them, and the introduction of the sprites killed the functionality of the arcade which caused the mineral deposit system's removal. To me that seems like a bad trade.

All this said, I think player-created content such as maps would be good as an end-game thing as it potentially leads to infinite hours of new gameplay.

TL;DR..
Personally I think I would prefer if sprites and the missions system didn't exist.

I know I would prefer*