This story reads like a decent fanfic of a quasi-Tolkien world. Though you don’t need to pay all that much attention to what is going on to know what’s going on. Characters don’t experience too much growth during the story, next to no struggle, and consistently feel like personifications of ideas instead of living characters. There’s no sense of scale in the world: a bagillion users but for all practical purposes only one small city and there’s no real sense that the world is big enough for all the users, but neither is there a feeling that the world is crowded with players either.
I think Mr. Willmarth has potential, so I’ll probably try book two. If you’re on a budget, skip this one, but keep an eye on his work.