Dynasty Warriors Online First Impressions

It's been a while since I've played a Dynasty Warriors game, but boredom has nudged me into trying Dynasty Warriors Online. 
  
After a couple of hours, a few things really stuck out to me:

• There's an overly long tutorial
  
• The world is structure to that of the PSO/PSU games
• The UI is unnecessarily hindered through layers of menus
• Faction starting zones (I'm not sure if there are multiple starting zones) are presented fairly well by named characters from the franchise
• There's no real persistent character leveling
• Joining instances with other players doesn't seem too different from playing by yourself, it just gets the job down faster

It's been a while since I've played a Dynasty Warriors game, but boredom has nudged me into trying Dynasty Warriors Online. 
  
After a couple of hours, a few things really stuck out to me:

• There's an overly long tutorial
  
• The world is structure to that of the PSO/PSU games
• The UI is unnecessarily hindered through layers of menus
• Faction starting zones (I'm not sure if there are multiple starting zones) are presented fairly well by named characters from the franchise
• There's no real persistent character leveling
• Joining instances with other players doesn't seem too different from playing by yourself, it just gets the job down faster

What do you mean by there's no persistent character leveling?

I've only played for like 3 hours. All I've seen so far is that you gain ranks, but they're only good for making quests available.

Yeah, I kinda fell off after my 6th hour of training, but I've got to at least play PvP before I move on to something else or not.