For 3 years I spent at least 4 hours a day on the message boards. Reading, writing, arguing, brainstorming... Outside of work, (or during work) that was what I spent my time doing. There were several different boards that I tried to participate in, but only one that could hold my attention and stave off my frustration.

I was a Horizons Fanboi. I spent my life on the official (or pseudo official) message boards, and was a solid contributor to the community. (I even became an editor at a fan-site, and a moderator on the forums...that's something that's NEVER happened before.) I was enthralled by the game. Its design, its promise, its example. I would eat, breathe, sleep conceptual MMORPG design. Then something happened that changed all that. I was accepted into the Horizons beta.

Since I was now an 'insider' it because impossible to stay on the official boards. I couldn't participate in any discussions on the 'outsiders' boards, because I knew too much that I couldn't say. Meanwhile, on the 'insider' boards, the topics were mostly 'nit-picks' about the current status of the game, and reprimands saying the game wasn't done yet. There was no room for forward-thinking or brainstorming. The dream of Horizons (and MMORPGs) was crushed by the reality.

However, I'm a blind optimist. I still think the 'reality' that Horizons became isn't because of actual realities, but rather because of mistakes. So, I'm going to write about what I think the mistakes Horizons made were (complete with silly subtitled sections):

There's no place like home...
...and in Horizons, there's no home at all. At least none that I ever saw. Granted, I never made it very high on the 'level treadmill' but that's always because I couldn't stay interested that long. I'd say that counts as a mistake. I think MMORPG designers under-estimate how much 'belonging' matters in MMORPGs.
Content doesn't keep players in the game. If all you have is content to keep people playing your game, the instant someone comes along with better technology, and newer content, the players are going to jump the fence. What actually keeps players in the game are the roots they have grown, the relationships they have built, and the sense of belonging that they feel.
Horizons has housing. As far as I can tell, they have the most elaborate housing of all MMORPGs. It's not instanced, it's immensely customizable, (I think) it has actual function (other than decoration), and it has sufficient beauty and interest. However, I don't think I'd call it the 'best' implementation of housing. Specifically, it lacks importance, and it lacks accessability.
In Horizons, to build a house, you have to clear a forest the size of Yellowstone to get enough building material, you have to work for the equivalent of 5 years to make the smallest shed, and you have to pay the equivalent of 10 years wages just to buy the smallest empty lot. It's not something a 'newbie' can do, and they did that on purpose. That was a mistake.

The "Right" way:
The first task of a new character in a MMORPG should be to find a house, or a dwelling. You should pop into existence in this new world and find a place to hang your hat. Just like life, this would probably be a small pre-furnished apartment. Once you found where you live then you go out to start your adventures. (An alternative is to get a job/profession first, and your 'profession' supplies a house. Maybe you live upstairs in the Ranger guild, or you have a shack behind the blacksmith shop, etc.)
This first house is all about 'temporary.' There's not much to it, it's not very pretty, and since 'everyone's got one' there's no status in it. (Technically, I think this can be done perfectly with the instanced 'apartment' type housing that was done with Anarchy Online and Neocron.) Having a house from the very beginning lets you base the gameplay around this sense of home or location. That way, when the player outgrows his starter home and buys/builds an actual house, they've already learned how it affects their game.
And it should affect their game. For tradesman, their home should be the center of their business. That should be where their most frequently used equipment is located. That should be where their mass storage is. Once they become rich, they can move onto 'hired' property, but most of the 'working class' tradesman should be based out of their homes. For adventurers, home is less important, but it could be a place to display your status symbols and trophies.

Overall, Horizons really missed their opportunity for some 'customer lock-in' that the customers actually would have appreciated. When a person has a home, that they've lived in, grown in, designed, built, fought over, etc....when a player has put time and emotion into building their place in the world, they won't just drop it for the next round of flashy graphics. If you allow for extra depth in housing, guilds, relationships, the 'belonging' part of the game, you'll have more staying power than those who focus on combat and loot.

Strangely enough, the next section is about Combat and Loot...
The mistake Horizons made here was thinking that the current formula worked. I guess you don't want to stir things up too much, but you'd think that 5 years of people begging for something else would convince them to try something different. Horizons is another game in the stagnant tradition of "fields full of similarly leveled monsters waiting around to be harvested." I just don't get it. Why does anyone assume 'shooting fish in a barrel' makes for good exciting gameplay.
With their 'loot' model, I think they just couldn't figure out what to do. I applaud their decision to help out the crafter by not dropping all the swords, armor, items, etc that anyone could ever need. But in return, they made everything even more ridiculous. Zombies that are loaded to the gills with "Cookie Recipes". (or formulas for earthenware baking pans). Maggots that enjoy carrying around cedar logs and sandstone slabs. When occasionally a monster did drop something that made any sort of sense, it was worthless for any other use than the traditional 'merchant fodder' that has been a black mark on MMORPG economies since the get-go.
I actually can't imagine a WORSE design for combat and loot. They took everything that was wrong about MMORPG combat...and removed what was slightly good. (I won't talk about magic here. They did try something new, and I appreciate that 100%. I think there's good cause for them to try again though.)

The "Right" way.
Horizons actually came up with the right way in their own story. They just didn't develop it. Horizons is based on the active aggression of an intelligent enemy. There are forces out there actively trying to remove the 'player population' from the map. That seems to be the perfect lead-in to all the combat you can handle. Send the players into the war! Have the enemy actually attack the towns and villages. Have there be enemy encampments and outposts that need to be attacked. Make this war into a war, and not a shooting gallery.
Now, if you're a spider farmer, then you can go harvest spiders. If you're a hide worker who sells wolfskin cloaks, by all means, go out and hunt wolves. Paladins in the United Istarian Army have no business mindlessly slaughtering Ice Beetles.
I think if they would have matched the gameplay to the storyline of Horizons, then life would have been much better. Perhaps they do this at the higher levels. Once again I put forward that the fact I didn't reach the higher levels to find out is evidence that they made mistakes. If we were the last remnant of the Empire of Istaria, and we were pushing back against the conquering hordes, the game would have been good. Instead, we were citizens in a peaceful country questing for fame and fortune. You were absolutely safe unless you were looking for danger. You could port around from place to place with impunity. They ignored their own story.
What I would have done was based most the game on DEFENDING the settlements. By the time you have your own house, you should be spending a lot of your time fighting to defend that house, or paying someone else to do the same. Those who crave the glory, wealth, and challenge of it would push out and claim new settlements. You would then resume the role of defending your home. The attacks would come swifter and harder, but so would the experience and the wealth. The 'adventurer' or 'treasure seeker' could do their own thing, leaving their home unprotected to go look for their pot of gold, but they'd have to weigh the reward with the chance of survival and the risk of coming home to a ruined house. The combat becomes personal, the sacrifice becomes real, and the game becomes intense.

An Economy of Errors:
As should be obvious from my poor esteem of their combat game, I spent the vast majority of my time playing with the tradeskills in Horizons. I thought they were excellent. They were very close to what I wanted tradeskills to be. They were light years better than any other mainstream MMORPG I've played, and only slightly behind the king of all tradeskills, A Tale in the Desert. However, they did have a couple very glaring mistakes.
First of all, and sadly, it was all based on icons and lists in your inventory window. Except for the occasional equipable tool, there was never any visual evidence of workings and creations of tradeskills. No one ever saw a bronze bar, or a spool of thread. There were no piles of sand, or lumps of clay. It was basically 'paper skills'....lots of talk, with nothing physical to back it up. Also, and along those same lines, there was no equipment. You couldn't build any free-standing tools. There were no sawhorses, or cooking fires. No tanning racks or small looms. The only equipment to be used came pre-built and immovable. (I think you could actually build that equipment once you got a house...but I wouldn't know, and there didn't appear to be a need.) Pretty much, what you had to do was pretend you were doing something, because you certainly couldn't see the evidence of it being done.
I actually think that's forgivable. Those items are what I call 'hard assets'. You'd have to make 3D models and textures of millions of things in various stages of completion and disarray. You'd have to have a graphical engine that could support that kind of mess. And finally, you'd have to have a ruleset for keeping the world from being overrun with buckets of sand and discarded sawhorses. Sometimes it's acceptable to take the easy way out.
Other times it's not. By far, the largest mistake of the Horizons trade skills (disregarding the fact that most formulas can only be found in the pockets of zombies and skeletons) was the use of universal ratios. These can best be described by saying it took approximately 12 whole trees to make the most basic wooden bow. It took 10 full-grown deer to make a rough hide cap. The first thing that was ever said about Horizons trade skills, by a non-AE employee was 'What's up with that?'
The thing that was 'up with that' was universal ratios. Horizons designed their tradeskills picking a model such as 'flax' or 'ore'. They then devised formulas and time scales based on the refining of these resources. A lot of ore turns into a little metal turns into one sword. A lot of flax turns into a little fabric turns into one set of cloth gloves. Once they had their formula down, so it took X amount of time to produce X number of items, they just hit 'copy and paste' through the rest of the list of resources. However, that just doesn't work. Each resource should have been given it's own formula and model, and should have been balanced on it's own merits and needs.

The "Right" way.
Don't be lazy. Don't take the easy way out. I've already described what needed to happen. The 'right way' would have been to do it. One deer should have been turned into one hide which should have been able to produce a set of gloves AND a hat. One tree SHOULD have been able to turn into one or two logs. Each of which could have produced several boards. Each tree should have been able to make a couple bows.
The other mistake of tradeskills, as I said, is harder to condemn. As much as I think ATITD did many things right, I'm not blind to the fact that it was very full of clutter. The roads were lined with buckets of sand. The 'cities' were a jumble of random buildings and deserted equipment. It often looked like a shanty town after a tornado. However, there was much good with ATITD. There were botanical flaxen gardens. There were estates laid out with such planning and precision to make the French Aristocracy jealous. And also, after making an iron knife from your own forge, charcoal oven, kiln, brick mold, sharpened stone knife, you truly feel like a craftsman who has created an iron knife.

Horizons has been the best promise of a MMORPG since it's initial presentation, up until the moment the final product was released. Even through it's dark times, it's restructuring, it's refinement, it was the one shining beacon of hope in the world of stale ideas and copy-cat designs. However, despite its potential, and the grand hopes of it's unswerving fans, that entire legacy was erased by the lobotomized product that was released.

Horizons definitely did some things right, but overall it's a classic example of 'one step up and two steps back.' Most of the reviews of Horizons end up with the impression that there's just not enough there to impress, and it's more of the same ol' thing. Where there used to be a scion of the future, there's just a void that no one has stepped forward to replace.

I used to spend most of my free time on message boards discussing the possibilities of future MMORPGs. After that fateful day that I was accepted into the Horizons beta, I've never gone back. Now I don't post anywhere. Now I don't read anything. I stare blearily and without much interest at the gaming news sites waiting without hope for the announcement of a new project, a MMORPG that will reach to fulfill the potential of the genre. A game that will finally break the shackles of the 'its just a game' mindset that has restricted everyone else.

I'm waiting, but I'm not hopeful. Horizons stole, and then broke, my heart.