So the anti-botter crusade on the Payon maps is, uh, really beginning to get out of hand. I was leveling my homunculus earlier and tabbed back in after watching a short youtube clip to find some wise guy had dumped a bunch of dead branches on me, for doing something that is currently established as legal. What's next, just targeting players for leveling up in popular areas? "The REAL ragnarok players only level up on Roda Frogs and Hornets! YEAH!" I think we can all agree that a very small minority of players are participating in the widespread branch griefing on these maps, and while there is a lot of debate on the merits of the use of Branches as a bot deterrent (anyone who thinks this works is a moron, hth) maybe it's a better idea to save them for maps the bots aren't going to spend only 90 minutes on? (It's not, please stop wasting dead branches trying to antagonize unattended clients.)
Payon is the best leveling area for low level characters in the game right now - Geffen is probably close but you're not getting strawberries while you go and the farm maps are much harder to get to. If you ask an experienced player where to level most of them are going to point you to Payon, as will multiple forum threads. There is a lot of crowing on this board about how the game is dying and WP can't attract new players, but did you guys ever consider that introducing a player to a game by dumping a bunch of level 100+ monsters on them isn't a great way to do it? Ragnarok Online is a frustrating game to begin with. The translation is mostly terrible, the interface and default hotkeys are bizarre, the camera is frustrating, and a lot of the later features that were added to the game feel like they were tacked on, because let's face it, they were. Any player who is still playing long enough to hit their first class and go to one of the starter towns is a player who could potentially continue playing for months or years to come. But when they take one step out onto the Willow map or whatever and get destroyed by a bunch of biolabs monsters or incarnation of Morroc or whatever it's going to set a bad impression immediately, and players who don't know what dead branches are are going to assume this is an intended game mechanic rather than the juvenile griefing antics of a bunch of juvenile teenagers.
I would propose blocking dead branches on any map that is intended for players level 20 and below. The only valuable items on these maps are (debatably) pupa cards and strawberries, items that are saturated regardless of botters because of the huge volume of players on those maps to begin with. While it's fun to sit someplace convenient right next to a popular town while you farm summons with friends, it's not fun when you get ruined by a bunch of biolabs guys at level 14 and don't have the option to get on your high level main because you literally just started playing that day. Reporting the monsters in the dead branch thread is ineffective and if the metrics of other games is applicable to Ragnarok, only a small fraction of the playerbase ever actively participates in the forum, which means that many players simply don't have a means of recourse.
By the time the players have exited the newbies maps they should have enough familiarity with the game to keep themselves safe and cope with big piles of branched monsters. There's more places to level, consumable items are more accessible (since you probably have a little money by that point) and you may have had time to make some friends and party up with people. The risk of branched monsters is a thrilling part of the game that anyone who has played Ragnarok since the betas can get behind, myself included, but a number of very bad apples are ruining it for everyone else through excessive overuse of the mechanic. The problem is reaching the point where it could start affecting the health of the game. Please do something about this.
