The random advice for really new players.

Farm:
Get farm friends, and lots of them. Just ask in world chat for farm friends. The only way to level up your farm (and thus get access to more planting slots/better seeds) is to remove weeds/bugs and energize other people's tree's. There is a max of 200 XP that you can gain for your farm per day and that's relatively easy to get if you have 10 pages of farm friends. It's very difficult if you don't. :p

If you are going to be online stick to the one hour seeds, 4 plantings of one hour seeds give a higher yield than the 4 hour ones. Obviously, if you are going to be offline plant the 4 hour seeds.

You can plant whatever you want, once you hit L40~ I'd avoid the XP seeds since they don't scale really well with how much XP it takes to level. Personally I like all gold, but lots of people plant Kryn/Daru. Plant whatever you need the most of


Maximizing:
This is fairly obvious but do everything you can. Check the daily quests and make sure you do all of them. (L opens the quest log) Do all the incidentals like raiding other players cities and make sure if you can you hit 95 devotion every day. The extra whips come in VERY handy and they are hard to get. And make sure you do ALL the World Bosses's you can. There's three a day, try to get them all in since the WB is the best source of gold/daru in the game. Just don't waste vouchers on it, it's not worth it.

Make SURE you do the event quests and try for the mounts during the monthly events. They are often hard/impossible for free players to get but try anyway. Once you hit the higher levels getting more mounts becomes key to getting more powerful (more on this later) and except for a few mounts you either get them from the monthly events or you buy them with balens.

Always check the events tab at the top daily. There's often rewards in there like "reach x devotion" that give you some rewards and they change every few days.

Crypt Keys:
Make sure you blitz the Forgotten Catacombs every day (reset it as well when you get online each day) and whenever you get better equip/higher level troops, go back and see how far you can get. Use potions to buff yourself up since once you've cleared a level you no longer have to do it again, you can just blitz. If you barely beat a boss while having full pots on? Doesn't matter, you still can blitz and never fight him again

However, I would NOT recommend using crypt keys UNLESS you are a VIP. Early on, you get barely any rewards and the keys don't help much. Later on when you can get 70~ crypt tokens a day using keys is FAR more worth it and you will need a TON (literally, you will need close to 20k tokens to get everything) of tokens.
Now, free players can not get keys except from Guild Blessing, Battlegrounds chests, and the L40 campaign. You can also get them rarely from mystery boxes but I don't recommend opening mystery boxes, more on that later.
VIP's can get keys fairly easily from the VIP wheel so they don't care. Use 'em.


Mounts
At level 40 you get your shiny new horse.
The horse lets you move faster but that's not really the point, the biggest point of mounts is that they give you stat boosts and multiple mounts STACK.

Now, for free players, mounts are few and far between, your best bet is to try and get them from the monthly events other than that you can get a mount from the arena shop once you hit Crusader rank for 10k insignias, one from the Crypt shop once you complete L100 for 6000 tokens (you wont get that one for a while :p) , one from the guild shop once it's L10 for 50 million gold and the last mount you get after 15 weeks of getting 1000 PVP points. (if you get 1000 pvp points from Arena/BG in a week you get a chest at the end of the week that has a mount card in it, you need 15)

The rest must be purchased with balens.

In addition, you can get further stat boosts from mounts if you use training whips. Generally speaking, use most of the whips on your primary stat (int/power) and divvy up the rest between def/endurance.


More later.

Since I've been asked this question several times, I'll elaborate. Mounts STACK. When you get a new mount, it doesn't replace your old mount, you just get more stats. And the stats you go from the whips you used to train you first mount wont go away, they will stay. So train like crazy and get as many mounts as possible