77 replies to this topic

[MrBudd]

Ok, I got bored today so and friend and I decided to take a first hand experience at being a noob fresh in this game to see the many challenges and pitfalls a new player has in this game. While the both of us could have just started on a different server to be forced into uselessness and have no help, it's just not quite the same challenge as starting on the valkyrie server where there are more bots to compete with and higher market prices.

The challenge is simple, just make it through the game into a 3rd class lvl 110-120 char using mostly the lower end newbie/NPC/off the shelf stuff without any support other than whoever else is doing the challenge with you and other random noobies you find throughout your travels. Making money the way noobies usualy have to by selling loot to the NPC and leveraging the market to sell items.

Been doing it for a few hours now and I gotta say it's quite fun leveling as pure noobs with few others that are out doing the same. I highly encourate others to try the same and meet some newbies on the way doing this nostalgia run.

[meaning42]

Yeah, this is what I have been doing the last month... since I started a month ago.
Not quite 110 yet, 102 but I'm on my way.

[Oda]

An admirable endeavour, I take you up on said challenge! I'd like to see updates from players taking this challenge and their reflections on the experience of starting from scratch. If you don't mind my hijacking this thread I will post my impressions on what things work and what things need fixin' as well.

[stabzz]

I will be helping more on my rogue cause yea.

[GuardianTK]

When you start out fresh, you realize the Eden Group is a great support for lower leveled newer players. Eventually the challenge and grind starts to kick in at 85+ where you've already passed the limits on the Eden Quests, so you no longer have a place to lean on beyond that point. It would come down to the knowledge other players would give you.

Even if you're poor, the equips offered by the Eden Group come a long way in helping you. It's very possible to default those equips to get to rebirth and 3rd class. From there, your progress and leveling path would highly depend on what kind of 3rd class branch you've chosen. It's no joke to say the AB branch would rely heavily on partying from start to finish.

[IronFist]

how can u start as a newbie, when u know every aspect of the game...

[Cubical]

hes doing it on a different server with 0/0 storage, 0 zeny, cotton shirt and knife

u jelly?

Edited by Cubical, 30 April 2011 - 12:23 PM.

[dedinvegas]

Is there another way to play? lol, I'm such a noob. If your looking for a fresh start might I recommend starting in Ygg rather than Valk. Theres hardly anyone on the server so theres less noobs to compete with, Economy is better since the bots haven't ruined it (yet) but that doesn't really matter much since there arent nearly as many PC vendors as there are on Valk, thats a good thing though since you can actually walk through prontera on Ygg without wading through the congestion of people.

[Sera]

You could take this a step farther by offering a reward for doing it and turning it into a sort of contest.

But I don't mean a "Who can get there the fastest" type contest like was run a while back, that only promotes evil.

Offer a reward for the person who has the 'most complete' experience and encourage participants to document their experience in a sort of mini-blog. Give 'points' for interactions with other players and participation in the events, etc.

iunno, just an idea, but I think something like that would have been much better when the servers opened than 'reach 150/50 on a new character first'

[Tigra]

this is sort of like everyone that played Ygg when it opened
...except that the server had absolutely nothing (items, zeny, players)

[Sera]

this is sort of like everyone that played Ygg when it opened
...except that the server had absolutely nothing (items, zeny, players)

Has anything really changed since then though?


Kidding.... sorta.

[mooMOOmoo]

Someone should try making a series of video LPs on iRO, using a brand new Warpportal account and game account, and without transferring any items from your old account. If you want a buff slave or vend slave it should be a brand new account too, but can be in the same warpportal account as your main LP account.

Suggested procedure:
-Creation of Warp portal account
-Creation of 1 game account
-Full process of going through training grounds, until hitting job 10
-The first class job change.
-Travel between maps.
-Brief moments of leveling in various areas. You don't have to show your entire level grinding process.
-Optional: Browsing through the prontera market.
-Optional: Eden quests (new players may or may not know its existance)
-Job change to 2nd class.

(time skip)

-A brief moment of leveling at level 98.
-Reaching level 99 and rebirth.
-Job change to high 1st class.

(time skip)

-Job change to high 2nd class.

(time skip)

-A brief moment of job level grinding at 99/6x.
-Job change to 3rd class.

End of LP.

Edited by mooMOOmoo, 30 April 2011 - 03:05 PM.

[dedinvegas]

Someone should try making a series of video LPs on iRO, using a brand new Warpportal account and game account, and without transferring any items from your old account. If you want a buff slave or vend slave it should be a brand new account too, but can be in the same warpportal account as your main LP account.

Suggested procedure:
-Creation of Warp portal account
-Creation of 1 game account
-Full process of going through training grounds, until hitting job 10
-The first class job change.
-Travel between maps.
-Brief moments of leveling in various areas. You don't have to show your entire level grinding process.
-Optional: Browsing through the prontera market.
-Optional: Eden quests (new players may or may not know its existance)
-Job change to 2nd class.

(time skip)

-A brief moment of leveling at level 98.
-Reaching level 99 and rebirth.
-Job change to high 1st class.

(time skip)

-Job change to high 2nd class.

(time skip)

-A brief moment of job level grinding at 99/6x.
-Job change to 3rd class.

End of LP.

I <3 this idea
Would take a lot of work, but a video blog from noob to 99 and so forth, well that would rawk!

[antikv]

i tried and quit after half an hour....= = got killed by db summon walking back to pront from the archer job change....

[MrBudd]

how can u start as a newbie, when u know every aspect of the game...

By making a lot of the common noobie mistakes on purpose and MAKING them work. Most fresh noobies I see usually end up getting 1h mastery as a swordie with stats all over the place and thats exactly what I did. I really don't care what a lot of people think, going hybrid even as a swordie is entirely viable with renewal fixing up the mechanics. I'm not really planning out any real builds on this character either. Just making sure I have the minimum for bowling bash later on and adjusting my stats as I go. So far so good though. Lowish balanced stats along with 1h sword mastery and 2h sword mastery maxed out so I can leverage the size penalties of different weapons has been working out quite well. (mastery dmg adds quite a bit when you're ctrl-clicking).

As a veteran player of this game, if I leveraged the resources I had available on my primary account (zeny, items, etc..), it would have made my trek VERY easy, but as a noobie with all my resources cut off, I started this challenge with 1 other person with a couple more people joining on my noob adventures shortly. I have to say, the party system works perfectly fine at the lower levels with 2,3 and 4 way shares. Even in a party with 2 acos, 1 swordie and a noobie mage, I was still able to get a decent amount of EXP. Granted if I had all my available resources I could have leveled 3-4 times faster but it wouldn't have been much fun.

As for the eden group thing, it honestly does help me as a new player a lot in terms of gears and making me do quests for it. This was actually the first time I actually made use of the eden group for more than just the maneater blossom turn in quest. For noob gears, the Eden stuff actually isn't that bad.

Utilizing the same information I provide new players about making money in this game, I managed to actually scrounge up a sizeable amount of zeny as a new player. The trick was to leverage the market for items people are buying and the baby desert wolves that I was killing to get the eden group gears actually dropped Blood of Wolf at the exact rate as the lvl 103 Desert Wolf. Sold them for the market rate of 30k a piece and made about 200k or so split between a friend and I. Still, 100k is a LOT of money for a newbie. It allowed me to get a better headgear (kicking it old skool and got a regular swordie helm from izulde and unslotted sunnies from alberta) as well as let me buy and make a +7 Blade (got 7 phracon from the merchant quest in the training grounds).

What really surprised me is the sheer amount of CHEAP weapons that no one uses on the market that are actually pretty decent. Shortly after getting my +7 blade, I was itching for a weapon with more attack power but I was 10 levels away from being able to use a tsurugi as well as the Eden Slayer/Saber. It turned out that as a level 17 swordie, I was actually able to use an orcish sword that had almost double the attack power of my +7 blade and was being sold on the pront market for 20k. I didn't have the money to uprade it since it was a lvl 3 weapon and the cost of ori plus the cost of upgrading was still way too high. Granted, my Eden Saber is a lot better than the said Orcish sword when I finally hit lvl 26 so I was glad I didn't have the money to upgrade the orcish sword.

My advice to anyone starting fresh right based on my most recent experience is:

1. Don't be afraid of messing up your stats. Messed up stats still work quite well in renewal. Just have fun and make up for flaws in other ways.
2. Learn to leverage the weapon/monster size penalties to optimize your damage output.
3. Making money selling items to the NPC is hard. Take a bit of time and see if people actually buy the stuff you pick up on ragial.com and try to sell the items to other players when possible. I could have make an easy 1m or so farming blood of wolf off baby desert wolves for a while. Some players have buy shops where they pretty much rip off new players by buying items up at 1/2 the market price but if you talk to people they might buy it at a decent amount.
4. Eden group gear and most NPC gears actually aren't that bad, especially if you can upgrade them.
5. When you don't have money, old school parties are fun especially when you're too cheap to buy pots and the novice pots are running low. All the roaming acos out there are your best friends.

PS. Speaking of DBs, I picked up a couple killing willows and trying to kill a sohee at level 20 is HARD even with a couple others supporting you. Granted it sucks that killing higher level monsters don't benefit me much. It's an aspect of the same that needs to seriously be fixed.

EDIT: Hey Oda/Heim Does that "register a quest" thing in the eden group work at all?? It would be cool if a higher level player could use it to issue a quest to a newer player to hunt out items for them for a certain amount of money. Not everyone is going to have the priviledge of joining a guild like the one I run where I tell my newbies that they can make money selling me certain supplies. I'd LOVE to be able just to post a quest for them and put the reward money as a deposit.

Edited by MrBudd, 30 April 2011 - 06:50 PM.

[morphine]

This isn't a normal thing to do? lol

It's not really nostalgic unless one refrains from Kafra purchases, too.

[firzen]

This is kinda what I tend to do on my own, in my own mind. When my wiz transcended I tried not to have much outside help.

Pure overbearing on the game is what makes it lose it's old school touch

[Ianflow]

Ok, I got bored today so and friend and I decided to take a first hand experience at being a noob fresh in this game to see the many challenges and pitfalls a new player has in this game. While the both of us could have just started on a different server to be forced into uselessness and have no help, it's just not quite the same challenge as starting on the valkyrie server where there are more bots to compete with and higher market prices.

The challenge is simple, just make it through the game into a 3rd class lvl 110-120 char using mostly the lower end newbie/NPC/off the shelf stuff without any support other than whoever else is doing the challenge with you and other random noobies you find throughout your travels. Making money the way noobies usualy have to by selling loot to the NPC and leveraging the market to sell items.

Been doing it for a few hours now and I gotta say it's quite fun leveling as pure noobs with few others that are out doing the same. I highly encourate others to try the same and meet some newbies on the way doing this nostalgia run.

Technically I was doing this anyhow. I've been playing with mostly noobs like myself, but we've grown. I also have had help rarely from those whom I consider my overseers (In other words, people of class above me, the one I want to be in, and so, I ask advice). Technically, it's been okay. I've done a lot of different stuff, and I think I've come a long way despite being only 37/35 XD....
A friend of mine, tier 2, is considering making a guild now.

[Scuba]

Fun for like 20 minutes

[Hrothmund]

For me I did this when Valk launched, and it was quite fun hunting for weapons etc but I got bored at about 85 non-trans (this was pre-RE ofc) and missed my cool gears so when back to Loki/Ymir.

I do look at the eden quests with a touch of Envy though when I think back to my first days on RO, when you actually used first aid !

[Oda]

You could take this a step farther by offering a reward for doing it and turning it into a sort of contest.

But I don't mean a "Who can get there the fastest" type contest like was run a while back, that only promotes evil.

Offer a reward for the person who has the 'most complete' experience and encourage participants to document their experience in a sort of mini-blog. Give 'points' for interactions with other players and participation in the events, etc.

iunno, just an idea, but I think something like that would have been much better when the servers opened than 'reach 150/50 on a new character first'

Exactly! There are so many game systems (WoE, Marriage, Pets, Quests) that have little to no documentation and need you to go to an outside website for help that this could help to explain.

Like the newbie help rewards that Heim has talked about, maybe instead of something monetary like kafra points or KVM points, some kind of forum ranking system? Back when we had the post count rankings for people everyone had a little title, why not have something that would reflect things like how much a poster has created posts to report bugs or helped a new player or reported bots?



Having started my first swordie character since about 2006 so and the first one to get above level 30, it is a dramatically different experience than running around as an aco or thief. Finding leveling and quest guides is something you have to dig for, unfortunately I learned too late which level cut off is for the free skill reset NPC in prontera. The novice potions and butterfly wings I have been carefully hoarding unfortunately prevent Ms Demeanor from getting a reset into a proper agi swordslady.

A simple agi up+blessing makes a world of difference when you are out leveling and having even one other person on the eden group quests with you makes them really fly by. The rewards are pretty decent, no reason to be spending money buying NPC gear yet but money is still tight.

[blitzrick]

What RO needs is achievement system.

[Luckywhiterabbit]

Am I really the only one who finds achievements in games to be totally and utterly pointless? Unless some other reward is offered for getting achievments...

funnily enough, RO2 does have achievements apparently, or something like them.

[MrBudd]

This isn't a normal thing to do? lol

It's not really nostalgic unless one refrains from Kafra purchases, too.

It's a normal thing for newbies. I'm not referring to nostalgia circa 2002/2003 but more like a throw back of the simpler days as a noob when you didn't know better. Using kafra purchases is totally fine as long as you're not selling KP or something like that. I had a blast as a noob merchant back in the day renting a Light Epsilon axe for a week.

Fun for like 20 minutes

It gets boring fast if you solo it. Get a group of friends and play the game as noobs. It's quite fun that way.

[AtlasThunderbeef]

What RO needs is achievement system.

I would die to do this.

100,000 Midgard Score:

"Complete Okolnir, create Brynhild/Asprika"

10 Midgard Score:

"Reach level 50"

20 Midgard Score:

"Card your first Level 4 Weapon"

1000 Midgard Score:

"Obtain a Kreiger Von Midgard Weapon"

Appropriate scores would have to be set of course.

Edited by AtlasThunderbeef, 01 May 2011 - 11:16 AM.