My pre-conceived notions have been grim: renewal will be a complete disaster. Your only real hope will be having most old players finding your changes bearable enough and having the completely new system still be intriguing to new players. Unfortunately, since I do not p2p and play on the free server, I cannot even test things out to see if it's not as bad as I thought. Sorry, but for my post, it seems all you are going to get from me at this point is why renewal was never a good idea.
From the very beginning, it seems as though the purpose of renewal was to make it just like every other MMO out there. Flat damage boosts with boring weapon mechanics. Flat or even arbitrary armor effectiveness. Level means everything in the world and even affects
item drops. But I'm telling you, RO was successful because it was
RO, not some other run-of-the-mill MMO with spectacular 3D graphics. If you tried to make RO just like every other MMO, it would fall on its face because its mechanics would be nothing special but everything else -- quests, graphics, content, activities -- would be severely lacking.
Here's what I don't like about renewal:
Sprites: All the 3-x class sprites are ugly, over-baked, and overall just unappealing. The names for the classes even seem to become absurd, as they are just more random synonyms on top of more random synonyms which could have easily been a lower job instead...
Variety problems still not fixed: So I hear, the guys in charge of developing this thought there was a problem with weapon variety. It would be "too hard" to make new content that was desirable. They did not like how the trend was typically maxing your attack stat, then using a 4 slot weapon carded optimally. So what they did was jack around with the mechanics, make the % cards only affect the weapon's attack... and basically, they only change
what became desirable. NEWSFLASH!! Now everyone will be after the weapons with LARGE attack and a few slots. EVERYONE NOW. Before, if you had really low str or dex, it was a pretty good idea to use the lv 3 weapons with only 1-2 slots that no one else wanted. But now... guess what,
those weapons will be optimal for everyone! Look, if they wanted to make new content that was really useful, all they needed to do was grow some balls and use their head. Weapons that only have like 2% chance to inflict some status or proc some mediocre skill and still don't have any slots are
definitely not going to be desirable. Why wouldn't they just try to increase the slots or % chance or the power of such skills instead?
Level means everything: It was pretty cool how badly geared high level characters could get taken down by lower level characters. For instance, think of a level 95 knight with no mdef or any protection from freeze getting killed by 2 frozen JTs from a wizard. Or flip that around, level 70 knight catching a high level wizard off guard who has no vit, stunning him, and killing him. It could work both ways, and it also means the higher level player who IS more skilled and has better gear would definitely trash any low level player. But the reasons why are simple: stats, gears, and skill. Now you look at how renewal handles everything... if you are much lower level than someone else, you can't even put a dent in their HP. It isn't fair at all. When you get beaten by someone because they are higher level, it used to be because those levels gave them more HP and more stats to distribute. Now... you lose to someone who's higher level
just because they are higher level. This will greatly ruin WoE too... for the players that aren't max level. Basically it boils down to this: achieve max level like everyone else or you will die super-easy and won't be able to do crap.
Now you take a look at how monsters are handled. You get less exp if the monster is lower level than you... well, OK... if we did this in RO now, I could see where developers are coming from, but with the increase in the amount of exp needed to level anyway, it seems highly redundant and unnecessary even for mild exp penalties. But no, 10 levels above and you get NOTHING. It's probably also because those monsters do no damage to you anymore and you get a huge bonus on them but... they seriously went too far with the level factoring into everything. Hell, even if you are too many levels below a monster, you still get penalized! What's with that? If anything you should get a BONUS. Messing with the item drops is also stupid. RO is not any other MMO where items you find at low levels are worth absolutely nothing to the high level players. Think about this: in WoW, when you are a low level blacksmith, you can find stuff like copper and smelt it into copper bars. Who wants copper bars? Only people your level! The high level players would only be looking for stuff like adamantium. In RO's case, everyone is going to want jellopies for stupid quests, everyone is going to want ray cards, everyone is going to need yoyo tails for making food, and everyone is going to need steel for forging. It doesn't matter what level the monster is who drops the item or what level you are when you need them.
Defense: I don't even understand what the initial problem with the old RO system was. I think it was, again, developers freaking out because they lack the problem solving abilities or imagination to come up with gears that are desirable but won't break the limit of say... making 95+ defense possible. Even then, one might ask why would it matter considering there are such things as MAGIC which takes a different type of defense into account, and a plethora of skills, items, and abilities which ignore or even do MORE damage based on defense. The thing is, now all we have with renewal is VIT and STR being able to add to your defense, and armors being able to add defense in the hundreds... but it still nearly boils down to the same thing. The defense cap is at 1000, and even when you get that, it's 66% - 90% reduction. Or something like that; I don't know. What I do know is it all just seems hella arbitrary to me.
Monsters: From what I hear, monsters are all pretty much the same. They might have some different skills (especially boss monsters) but the only real thing that makes each different is -- you guessed it -- their level. And for that matter, as you level up and stay around monsters about the same level as you... fighting each of them is also pretty much the same. They've all got about the same amount of HPs, same defense, same accuracy, dodge, and attack. It's not really the same if you remember how RO used to play... mimics and wanderers have really high flee and attack speed and were the bane of every caster. Turtles and golems have high defense, tough to kill, but could still take huge damage from OI.
Cast time: Ok, personally I thought it was crap to let people get instant cast too. So what did they do for renewal? They made it so there was a fixed cast time -- one that cannot be reduced at all by stats or level. I feel they did at least have the right intentions this time, but they did it in an awfully clunky, inelegant matter. I hate hard caps on things. Consider this: what if your cast time was: (Base Time)*.99^Dex*.995^Int
That means, each dex point shaves off 1% of the cast time, and each int point takes off .5%. BUT, the next point in dex does not additively stack to take off 2%. More like it takes 1% off of the remaining time that had 1% taken off of it. Or in other words, it reduces exponentially. Our exponents are .99 and .995. You keep increasing their power, and they will continue to approach zero... BUT, the rate they approach zero decreases, as the power increases, and they will never actually reach zero. With the formula I suggested, having 160 Dex and 180 Int would give you an 8% cast time. So essentially, having dex wouldn't necessarily be an "all or nothing" scenario. Each stat point takes off the same portion of cast time remaining as the last... this would just mean returns become somewhat diminishing. And it would be up to players to decide how much dex they want. The numbers do not have to necessarily come out like this. You can tweak the exponents around for some more desirable effects. Still, I just believe that using an exponential formula is always better than a formula that involves some value, x/cap.
I believe the same thing could even be done for status effects, such as stun resistance = 1 - .99^VIT. This is somewhat of a different matter though, although the situation is still probably not any better than it is on non-renewal servers...
Edited by LethalJokeChar, 11 September 2010 - 09:21 PM.