Look, mains have been boring for months now. We haven't received a good episodic update to the game in like a year. The updates we've gotten were the crappy localized towns that virtually nobody was looking forward to. We need malangdo island, new woe investment system, new battlegrounds GUI, etc to get people interested. My bet is on this classic server delaying any implementation of episodic content from Korea because the game staff has had their hands full working on designing classic server. Which points to my previous post about the classic server being damaging to the health of the main servers.
At least 2 of those things are happening in the next couple of months.
Classic didn't effect new content, because all the work was done by us, the development team was not a factor for its implementation. If any damage has been done it is the damage to myself and my cohorts here health due to long hours and the stress of making it work. I think that the image many players have of how episodic content is produced and distributed is not close to reality. Contents for delivery in July are worked on for translation and such back in April or before, and the groups that do those things were never a part of the classic server process.
Renewal and Classic are 2 different games. The play style is different and likely will diverge further as time goes on.
Right now CLassic is on old school mode, IE not much content in yet, but the base work of what is to come is there. We will be updating it every 2-3 weeks with small updates. Basically adding the maps/quests monsters in. And eventually PVP, WOE, Trans etc.
All the updates to get up to episode 12 (which is destruction of morroc) are planned to take anywhere from 9 to 12 months. So don't expect everything will be quick to get there, it already will be faster than most players can absorb the new content.
For Renewal, the update path is more normalized where we will continue to get content and system updates from the development team at regular intervals. The current update plan for Renewal servers is
WoE update, being tested presently : planned live implementation is early August.
Package 1 update contains Malangdo island and its cats paw traders. Both of these updates introduce a lot of new gear into the game, from the WoE side it changes what castles are available, new dungeon with WoE supply hunting, and new PVP oriented gear to gather. It also has a new dungeon investment system to allow non-guildies access to some of the goodies.
Both of these updates are slated for August on Renewal. Also the long term plan is Any 99/70 character on Classic will get copied (not moved) over to Ymir. This is part of that push to get more people into RO both in its Classic and Modern versions. Alot of talk of merge this or that.. Right now the answer is no.
Doing a merge of even a planned merger server like Ygg takes 2 months, Doing anything like that Ymir would take more time to work out, as the DB for that server is 100s of times bigger than the other servers. Before killing ymir there would be other things done to keep it alive such as removing the VIP requirement, or doing discounted transfers to it from the other servers etc. Ymir server really can't be merged due to the major difference in items, there is a different update that has to be done to mitigate the god item craziness first before any merger plan could occur.
All that said, it is way too early to talk about Ymir mergings especially since we have updates and events planned already to tend to those numbers. The current numbers were actually expected in the early days of Classic launch, things are going as planned.
Edited by Inubashiri, 11 July 2012 - 06:17 PM.