What sucks is that they COULD fix all of these problems easily (they being kRO of course, iRO obviously doesn't have the same resources).
No trade skillsWe have mining in the game. It works. The problem is that all it does is get you Cat Hand points and the occasional sage enchant stone.
We have forging in the game. It works too. It's just completely useless because you get a grand total of TWO things you can do to a weapon (element and "very"), and there's vastly superior weapons to anything a smith can make. Also, you can ONLY make weapons, all other gear types are off limits.
We have cooking. It just has a terrible success rate, makes nothing but stat food, and makes stat food that no one will ever use because what little value it had was destroyed by the KP version. Additionally, the chef hat to start the skill requires such an asininely long list of stuff to make that most won't bother. Guys? It's a CHEF HAT. It it takes more than 10 minutes to get the stuff to but a poofy white piece of cloth over your head, there's something wrong here. If a chef hat somehow uses hundred of DRAGON SCALES, there's something very, very, VERY wrong here.
We have fishing... but like mining, it serves no real purpose except Cat Hand points (and the occasional OPB if you're super lucky).
We have potion brewing, and even have a special mass crafting system via link... but all it does is make the normal pots, with a bonus if you manage to get ranked.
We have an absolute crapton of furs, leathers, metals, ores, and all sorts of other materials dropping from various monsters, and while there's a couple of "why the hell does he drop THAT?!" ones, for the most part, they put some serious thought into what drops what. In spite of this, most of these items are either used by a single headgear NPC, used in a single quest, or are flat out vendor trash.
We have components that could easily be used for other trade skills. We have ink, we have feathers, we have a ton of dyes, we have multiple kinds of paper, and we have various kinds of gems and magical reagents. How hard would it be to add scroll crafting, using stuff already in the game, and making scrolls that are already in the game? Hell, the sage even kinda sorta has scroll crafting built into the class - it's just used for a whole 1 type of item.
To fix:
Mining - Add more metals that can be mined and used for forging materials. Put mining sites on more than 3 maps. Add a mining skill that levels the more you mine. Higher skill levels will decrease the chance of getting a stone instead of a real item, and can give a chance of getting a double roll from the mine. Remove the daily limit on mining, and instead simply remove the Cat Hand quest ore from the drop table once you've gotten your 3 for the day.
Forging - Instead of just "elemental" and "very" add a whole list of things that can be put on a weapon. The 3 forge slots still apply, so you have to carefully choose what you want. Having forging success rates improve the more you do it, and make some very powerful gear that *must* be player-forged, but requires rare stuff (which will mainly be provided by the best miners.) Add crafting for things that aren't weapons on the 3rd job, or better yet, make them side skills like cooking.
Cooking - We have a gazillion food items in the game, but only the stat foods are actually cookable. Come up with logical ingredients for the other food items, and put some in each of the 10 levels of cooking. Make the L6-10 cookbooks much easier to obtain. Add a few rare, but powerful, cooking items that you need to find a recipe for. Make some new food items too while you're at it - they're not hard to code. Make cooking failable only when you attempt something way beyond your cooking level. Instead, give stronger versions that have a chance to roll, with the chances increasing the more you level the skill. Show a level and exp instead of hiding it in a formula we have to look up on a wiki.
Fishing - Add more than one kind of fish, and use them in cooking recipes for various effects. Make the skill levelable, and increase the chances of good fishing rolls as it improves. Remove the daily limit on fishing, and instead just make the Cat Hand tails and marlins just stop rolling after you get so many in a day.
New Skills - I already mentioned how a scroll crafting skill could work, but it wouldn't be hard to think of others as well. There could even be the ability to craft cards.
The thing is, none of the above is even difficult! They could easily throw all of this into a single update.
Few quests, little storylineThe Sign, KH, and the Swartvalt lines all had interesting plots to them, but there's not much else. There's the occasional nod to the manwha, like when you find out that the Geffen fountain no longer goes to Alfheim because they bailed out and moved to the New World, but a lot of the quests seem like almost an afterthought.
RO actually has a very robust quest system. There's a ton of objectives it supports, and if they actually used what they coded, they would absolutely blow WoW away with their quest content. Instead, they make a whole 3 quests every 4 months, most of them don't tie into storylines at all, and they seem like almost an afterthought in most cases instead of a major part of the game.
Making new quest *types* involves a lot a code, but once they're in, you can easily make hundreds of interesting quests by mixing and matching the types, thinking up some good plot lines, and giving appropriate exp and items for the effort.
Additionally, the game *has* a quest log, yet it almost never actually uses it. Yes, I realize this is because it's a recent (relative to this being an 8 year old game) addition, but how hard would it really be to make sure all of the old quests actually use the log? There's what, maybe 100 total quests to do?
Lack of stuff besides grinding and WoEWhat REALLY sucks is with some Korean games, you look and say "bah, this is always going to be nothing but a grinder, the game supports nothing else". RO's not like that. It HAS support for epic quests, detailed trade skills, instances, minigames, and a huge array of other stuff which - especially paired with the depth of character customization, could result in an incredibly popular game in the west. They just almost never actually USE any of what they've coded.
An interesting question is this: is it possible for the iRO staff to try to kick iRO more in this sort of direction? You added the REQ system to make the game more party-friendly (which was a great idea), so you're clearly allowed to make *some* changes to help this version thrive. Would it be possible to make more actual quests, and more trade skills, even if you have to half-ass it by storing levels, stats, etc on an NPC (you can do things like make the scroll crafting NPC be a desk, so it's not obviously hacked together)?
Edited by Mwrip, 17 August 2010 - 06:47 PM.